Wednesday 24 October 2012

We All Know What Happens When We Assume...

This rant is brought to by making an ass out of you and me.


After having a good rant on this dude changes his web name too much blog, I got to experience a bit of first hand assuming that drove me so bonkers last night.

One thing that took me a really long time to understand is to stop judging people at the gym.  Everyone has their own goals in their head and you're best to just leave them alone and well 'do you'.

Granted, I do silently judge when something looks so wrong I'm 99% sure I'm going to see them in my clinic later, but I keep it to myself and go about my thing.

What I haven't really talked about on this blog is that I'm halfway through Jamie Eason's Live Fit.

I love it, but I'm saving a review for later.

To begin with, I was pretty pumped to walk in to my gym to find the squat rack empty.  Silently I did a little whoop in my head and BEE LINED it over.   My first exercise was a narrow stance squat, something I've never done before.  I was playing around with which muscles I was using and going slow with just the bar.  I thought I was doing okay when a fellow gym goer caught my attention.  I removed my earbuds thinking he would ask me how many sets I had left.

WRONG.

He proceeded to tell me that I should do a wider stance and interrupted my workout for a good 5 minutes after I explained that I was trying to do narrow stance.  This convo included how I was going to wreck my back and knees.  NO SHIT.  That's why I'm low weight and trying to get it right.

20 minutes later I started double walking lunges.  Step-down-up-down-step.  He catches me at the end of a set and the exchange goes like this:

Guy:  Double Lunges eh?  Pretty tough.

Me: Yeah, my legs are dead after that set.

Guy:  You know you don't have to kill yourself

Me:  Meh, I know my body pretty well, I'll go down in weight if I need to.

Guy:  You know, bodybuilding.com has some pretty tough programs.  There's this other site called T-----nation----dot---com that has some good programs.  Not so hard.

Me:  Yeah, I know that site. *starting to fume*

Guy: So what's your name.

Me: Kelly.

Guy: I'm *blahblahblahnolongerlisteningblahblahblah*

Me: Cool.  Have a good workout.

I wish I could have accurately described how small he made me feel.  I avoided going near him the rest of my workout. 

What I'm assuming:  He thought I didn't look 'fit' enough to be doing what I was doing.  Just because I'm 5'1" and somewhere around the 160 mark does NOT mean I'm out of shape or inept at lifting weights.  Just because I haven't quite got the form down, doesn't mean I don't know what I'm doing. 

The worst part:  I turn my physio brain off when I walk out the door of my work.  I had NO capacity to say something back to him.


I just hope I don't have to see him at the gym again.







Wednesday 17 October 2012

The Number Game

I had a thought yesterday. 

Actually, I surprisingly have many thoughts on a regular basis but not every one of them is sane. 

My thought was this:  I've spent a majority of my 26 years focused on numbers.  My pant size.  The number on the scale.  How many points/calories I've ate.  How many times did I go to the gym that week. 

I've done away with two of these numbers.  I haven't set foot on a scale in over two months.  It has been the most freeing experience of my life.  Especially because I take pictures of my progress every month or so.  I don't have shitty days because I weighed myself.  I don't beat myself up over not losing from one week to the next.  Oh I pigged out on sushi and have sodium bloat?  I don't react twice as bad since I don't see the number momentarily go up.

I've also stopped counting calories.  I try to fit too much crap into my day if I do.  Instead, I give my body what it wants (even if it means a burger and fries or chocolate).  I don't care about calories.  I care about maxing my protein which seems to mean I eat less.

I have one more to give up this week. 

My pant size. 

I'm not sure what I started out as prior to this journey.   I know I had a pair of size 12 jeggings that were pretty snug and some stretchy lulus.  But that's about the extent of what I wore.

I now seem to be about an 11/12. 

But really.  What does it matter?

As long as I'm healthy, happy, and seeing strength gains and body composition gains, I don't need to worry about fitting into a size 8.  It's been my goal for so long to get back to an 8.  Today, I'm letting it go.  I may get back there one day or I may not.

I thought about why I wanted an 8 sooooo bad.  It's all I've wanted for 2 years.  I realized it's because it's not a "plus size" number.  Sure, I guess a 12 is considered the plus size, but a 10 is still double digits.  In my head, I needed to shun that number.  *please note I think all women are beautiful no matter what their size.  It was something I had built in my head.*

You know what?  I don't care anymore.

I'm happy with my progress.  


Numbers are just numbers.  They can't hurt me.


Monday 15 October 2012

I Sweat Rainbows

This weekend, I got to participate in something really awesome:  The Colo(u)r Run!!  

There was a moment at 3:12pm while we were stuck in traffic on the 401 headed to Montreal when I really really really wanted to just stay in Toronto.  I didn't want to race.  And then I thought about it.  This 'race' was supposedly the happiest run on the planet.  What was I worried about.

6 hours later... we were in Montreal and having dinner.  

Because we couldn't leave until Friday night, we had to pick up race packages Saturday morning.  I woke up at an ungodly hour to see that it was still dark out and it was -2 degrees.  I was not prepared for negative temps.


 But I laced up my pink Sauconys and pulled on my zebra socks, and we headed out the door.


Because we got there at 7:30am (my irrational fear of being late combined with the fact that there was a ton of warnings about how busy it would be) we got our gear super quickly and had a 1.5 hours to try to stay warm.
Clean... not for long.
 I stole Greg's purple package and shoved it in my bra.  Sports bras are very handy I tell ya.


How to tell you're not at a 'serious race': people were milling about in the Color Store/Race Pack pickup area well after 9am, the official race start.  I couldn't find the damn start line until 9:15.  AND NO ONE WAS PANICKED ABOUT IT.

Beautiful Montreal, the white dots are actually runners on the other side.  You can also see some people waiting to start just sitting on the docks.



The run itself was amazing.  I ran most of it fairly fast (I think) and appreciated the bottleneck at the colour zones as a bit of a rest period.  The best part?  No one really cared about times and the stops etc.  Barely anyone had headphones.  I saw a ton of people skipping while doing it.  My favourite parts were watching people roll in the colour and throw it all over themselves.  

They weren't lying when they said it was the happiest run on the planet.  I get it now.


 After a long drive home, I decided to do a little celebrating with my favourite brewery's awesome pumpkin beer, Weiss O'Lantern.


If there's a Colour Run in your area I so, so, so recommend it.  I can't tell you how much fun it was.  And if you do do it, enjoy the moment.  Greg and I didn't run together, but I wish we had and had gotten even more colourful.  

It's okay though.  There's always next year.