Round

Well, I have had good intentions of continuing to exercise but it’s met the road of reality and nothing much has happened. It’s going to take some serious effort on my part to be able to exercise during the work week - my days are too hectic. I should have gotten my act together Monday, as I knew it was my only really sure day, but I felt lazy after 3 days in a row (from a base of nothing) so I took it off. The rest of the week has been the usual crazy stuff. Getting out of meetings at 9pm or getting stuck in the suburbs for a  teleconference that I’d hoped to have from home (and therefore getting home 2 1/2 hours later).

The strange thing is how much I missed exercise. I haven’t exercised for a LONG time but somehow after 3 days I missed it already. Well, I at least took advantages of opportunities to walk a bit more than usual, getting in an extra 15 - 30 minutes each day. I was counting on going to the pool on Friday evening but I just found out the pool is closed for a few days before opening for summer hours on Saturday, so tomorrow might or might not be an alternative form of exercise…

In any event, although exercise hasn’t been there, it’s been missed, and that itself is a big move forward.

There is one really good thing to have come out of the past 10 days downspin - I feel like I’ve come back to exercise. Having avoided most exercise for about a year, this is a major milestone.

A few weeks back I did an exercise of what I want my life to be like in the future (at a healthy weight) and I was surprised to see how much active lifestyle stuff was on that list. Things like going hiking, riding a bike, feeling up for impromtu exercise opportunities are all things I consider healthy people to do routinely. Add to that a discussion I had with a cardiologist who was very point-blank about the health benefits of exercise being totally separate from weight loss (not the calories-in, calories-out equation) and things were churning away in my head for a while on this topic.

It reminds me of when I started at the gym during my Big Loss — when I first met with the trainer she asked me how often I was planning to work out and my response of 20 min 2x a week was met with a firm response that it needed to be a LOT more to have much impact - 45 min cardio, 4 times a week is what she said. And she did scare me away for a while, I think it took 2 1/2 more months before I started to exercise, but when I did it, I did it, and the results were there. I needed a lot of time to think about it before I took action then, and I guess I did now too. A few weeks back I wrote about some of the reasons I’ve resisted exercise, and all of those remain true - but of course simple laziness is the number one reason!

But the bottom line is that for my health and my weight and my mental well being I am coming back to exercise. I’ve always felt better about myself when I’m exercising, and I’m giving it a big push for this summer.

What am I going to do? A lot of things, but what I’m not going to do is re-join the gym right now. I’m going to get a Velib card for renting bikes here in Paris. I’m going to check out bike paths that I can get to without getting killed on the city streets for my own bike (which is much comfier!). I’m going to keep going to the pool, keep going on walks. I’m going to dust off the elliptical machine and use that from time to time. I might whip out a DVD or two. I’m basically going to mix it up. This summer I hope to go hiking a lot - it won’t be too much, since I’m really out of shape, but just moving will be really good for me, body and soul.

I’ve decided to keep track via a minutes goal is in increments of 500 minutes, which I’ll also track to follow how long it takes me to achieve each set of 500 minutes. I’m pasting the ticker here, but it’s at 220 minutes right now.

500 Minutes of Exercise tracking :

• 1st set : June 27th - ???

Since last Fall I also started tracking my walking by working on a virtual walk to Bilbao (in Spanish Basque Country). There is a small amount of cheating (or creativity, if you will) - I count every 15 minutes of walking as one mile (which is not always the case). For this I’m picking up the ticker from where I left off -all other tickers have been reset to zero, but I haven’t been totally sedentary these past few months - this sucker was stuck at 192 for quite a while - but 192 miles is nothing to laugh at either!

Look for more Walking to Bilbao pitstops in coming weeks.

After months and months of not exercising,  I have to say it feels really good to be a little sore today.

My legs are stiff, my back hurts a little in all kinds of places, my belly is tender - all of it clearly muscle pain, all of it related to the fact that I have finally broken the inert freeze I’ve been in.

Yesterday I went out for a long walk, exercise-style, and realized after a few minutes that I needed to pick up the pace from my normal one if I was to call it exercise - which I did, and was walking at a considerably faster clip than usual for an hour.

I am needing to get a move on right now to get to the pool this morning before it gets too crowded.  How’s that for a change of pace, usually my Sunday mornings are all about lazing around!

Still, I’m not pushing myself too hard - a little sore is fine and hard to avoid when you start moving, but I don’t want to be worse than this, so I’ll keep my pool time today to 30 minutes again to make sure I don’t overdo it.

Thanks so much for the cheers - I really appreciate them!

Thanks so much for the encouragement to just go to the pool and see what happened.

I went and it was fine. Not wonderful (it was kind of run-down looking) but just fine, and the water was nice. I swam for 30 minutes, did 26 lengths of the pool. I could have gone longer actually, but was starting to get tired and then the decision was taken out of my hands, they told everyone to get out of the water about 20 minutes before closing time (the gyms in Paris do this too). I wasn’t too disappointed, as I think I’ll go back to the pool this weekend.

It was pretty crowded when I got there, and the first person I saw was some teenage girl with a knockout figure in a bikini standing by the edge of the pool flirting with a bunch of well-built young men. Yikes. I had that moment of hesitation and then just said to myself to suck it up and get over it, and from then on it was fine. Me, big, huge, in my full-coverage swimsuit, with my cellulite and puffy body, bad legs and all, walking around not worrying about what anyone thought from the moment I left the changing room until I was fully dressed again about an hour later. In fact, at the pool it’s like it is at the beach - you see ALL KINDS of bodies. There are of course some beautiful ones, but in general that’s not the majority, and at the end of the day those less-than-perfect bodies are all doing something for themselves, and that in itself is a really good thing.

The water was pretty warm, and although it was crowded the lap swimming worked reasonably well (considering we’re talking about unruly French people here). It was less chaotic than I’d expected, although much more so than swimming laps in the US. They had sectioned off the pool into 3 areas - one for horsing around (kids mainly) another for laps, and a third section in the shallow end where they were teaching an aqua-aerobics class. (Bonus! I got to see what one of those was like, since that’s also something that’s been bubbling in the back of my mind).

As I mentioned in my earlier post, I’d been putting off going to the pool for a LONG time. I first looked up the pool and it’s hours on the web last September, and I went by to get the information sheet in January. So how did it stack up versus my expectations?

Well, it was cleaner than I expected, although the tiles etc are clearly old and worn. The unisex changing room turned out to be a non-event, as everyone changes in little changing booths, which have real doors on them. The floor is kinda gross, but I’d anticipated that and brought my flip-flops, so I went directly from shoes to flip flops and my feet never touched the floor. Showers are communal too, but everyone keeps on their suit. Sure, you don’t rub down and wash yourself the same way, but I did rinse off and even washed my hair. What’s provided is pretty minimal, but I had thought ahead and brought my own towel with me and swung by a sporting goods shop on my way to the pool to buy a swim cap (mandatory for both men and women, someone had told me about this, that’s how I knew to do it). I had a 2 euro coin with me for the locker (returned) although I’d also brought a padlock with a key on a safety pin.

I forgot to bring a comb, and if I start swimming regularly I’ll need to find a French equivalent of Ultra-Swim shampoo. And probably the waterproof ear plug things, I tend to get ear infections when I swim…

All in all, I am SUPER PROUD OF MYSELF for going. I enjoyed it and can see myself working swimming into my life from time to time. I’d like to go back over the weekend to get another dose.

Quite unexpectedly, I went to a gym yesterday.

My plan had been to take a nice long walk in the afternoon while my DH took my DSS to an indoor rock-climbing place. As I was getting into the shower my DH told me that the rock-climbing place had a gym too. Did I want to go with them and use the gym there?

Now, to put things in perspective, I haven’t set foot in a gym for over a year. My over-enthusiasm to get in shape for my wedding last year had me pushing myself very hard at the gym and something I did aggravated a herniated disk I already had - and I ended up with severe, debilitating sciatica that had me out of work for months, on tons of narcotic pain-killers, in surgery, and canceling our honeymoon. Not to mention that gyms in Paris are always dingy and smelly and old and ugly and dirty too.

I wasn’t missing the gym here, but I do miss feeling good and I know exercise needs to be part of my life. Getting back into the gym habit is something I’ve been thinking about for a while now, and while I haven’t moved to action I’m aware it’s a question of When, not If.

So I took the opportunity to go w my DH to this new-to-me location. Clearly it’s a climbing center, but they do have a lot of weight machines (forbidden to me since my back surgery) and a few rickety and very dirty cardio machines.

I’ve always felt the hardest part of the gym experience is getting there, and this was no exception. Once there I made the rounds of the machines, got on a treadmill, then took a few minutes on a stepper, back to the treadmill for a long walk at a reasonably rapid pace (faster than I walk when I walk for fitness around town for sure!) and played with moving the incline up and down every few minutes. I ended w 10 minutes on a bike. In all, I did one hour of exercise and was sweating (in part due to the lack of air conditioning, but it was also the most serious exercise session I’ve had in a LONG time).

I am very proud of myself for going. It was good to be w the family doing an active outing (even if I didn’t do the rock-climbing with them). It also really got me thinking about how to get more of the sweat-type of exercise into my life - either my DVD, my dust collector elliptical machine, or biting the bullet and going back to gym membership.

Well, I’ve been walking again these past few days.   And we’re actively discussing re-joining the gym (although this does not count for much, as talking about is NOT the same thing as actually joining, let alone exercising there )

On Friday I got home from work a bit earlier than I expected and realized I could get one of my Saturday errands done if I hurried out the door, so I threw on some walking shoes and grabbed my iPod (hoping it would still be charged, as I haven’t used it since I last went walking over a month ago) and headed out the door.  It was wonderful.  Warm and sunny afternoon, my audiobook on the iPod which is a good one, a nice 45 minute walk, and the errand accomplished.  Not bad at all.

Yesterday was another fabulous and beautiful day here in Paris.  Warm but not hot - perfect for jeans and a t-shirt when walking around, sunny, beautiful floral Spring.  In this amazing, fun, interesting city.  My DH & I had planned on taking a long walk around town a few weekends ago and then time slipped away from us so we didn’t do it, so yesterday we attacked - it was great.  We walked around the Latin Quarter for about 4 hours, doing some shopping, going down small streets that he knew for one reason or another, etc.  Nothing strenuous, but still, on our feet and moving for several hours is unfortunately considerably more exercise than I’ve had in weeks.

Food these past few days has been okay.  I’ve made mainly good choices in some more difficult circumstances.  I’ve done okay on the fruit & veggie counts, but not as spectacular as earlier in the week - but the weekend has been a real foodie one for us, and in that context I’ve done okay.

Friday 9 : B - 2 smoothie (berries, orange), L : 3 - carrots, cucumber, tomato; S : 1 apple, D : let’s call it 3 (but considering it was a 3*** restaurant and we had multiple desserts and wine it was not a dieting moment…but it sure was delicious!)

Saturday 8 : B - none (woke up late after late night dinner Friday) L - 3 (tomatoes, mango, peas/carrots) D : 5 zucchini, carrots x 2, eggplant, tomato

A friend suggested I do 5 minutes of exercise on my dust-ridden elliptical machine. She had just bought one and was excited to have it. I commented that I never use mine. Bought with the best of intentions, of course. And quickly abandoned.

So yesterday evening waiting for my DH to make it home I hopped on with a book in hand and reset the timer from when I used to go one hour… a lifetime ago…

5 minutes was HARD for me. I must have looked at the clock every 15 seconds or so. I felt my thighs burning and was breathing hard. Wow I am so out of shape.

But 5 minutes is 5 minutes more than I’ve done of serious exercise in a long time, and I was really happy with myself for doing it.

Back in November I decided to start counting my exercise time towards a goal. I am currently walking for exercise I chose to measure in miles. Since I’m very interested in the Basque country, and we had a weekend planned there in February, I chose Bilbao Spain as my destination. So I’m walking to Bilbao.

Bilbao is 462 miles from Paris (my home). Some of you suggested I makes some stops along the way, which I found to be a big improvement to my original plan. This is my third stop in my virtual tour, and this time I’m marking the miles walked to where I could have gone - because Nancy is the opposite direction of Bilbao. But since it’s a virtual walk it’s really easy to change direction whenever you want!

We also canceled the real-life weekend in Bilbao. It was supposed to be this weekend, leaving on Friday, but we had an IUI and my DH has been sick so there was just no way for us to get away right now. We’ll book it for another time, no doubt after I’ve EARNED it! Once I started walking towards this goal I realized it would be pretty hard to make it halfway there before the trip, so I’ll really feel it’s worth it once I’ve walked my 462 miles before getting there.

During this week while walking to appointments and adding up little 15 minute walks I made it to 176 miles, so I decided to give myself a “stop” here and find out a little something about Nancy France, a town I’ve never been too but that I’ve heard about several times.

Nancy is in the Lorraine region of France, towards the German border. During WWII the Germans claimed this region (plus Alsace) as part of the German state and thus spared it much destruction in the war.

The city is listed as Unesco world heritage site, largely due to the Art Nouveau architecture. It looks over-the-top but pretty as is typical of this style.

I love art and architecture, so this city looks like a really great place for me to visit and looks small enough to do easily in a weekend. I would love to visit this museum.

And food? Each time I “stop” in a new town we look at the local foods - and with Nancy we will not be disapointed. This is the home of Quiche Lorraine, created in 1586, and adding to the waistlines of the French and the rest of the world ever since.

It’s a rich egg quiche in a rich crust, traditionally made with egg, bacon and cream and in modern times sometimes with cheese. When you add onions it is no longer Quiche Lorraine, it becomes Quiche Alsacienne (the region next door).

Nancy also claims to have invented a type of Macaron but this is not a debate I think is worth getting into.

Macaroon cookies (which are not the shredded-coconut sugar bombs of the US) are in my mind an over-rated cookie. The ones in Paris that make everyone ga-ga are in fact it’s two macaron cookies (like the ones in Nancy) filled with a cream-butter-sugar filling flavored with something and thus made into a little sandwich. The flavors have gotten very creative in recent years but to me they are still not fabulous… Although they are pretty, look:

Finally, my heart lept with joy when I read that Nancy (well, the region around Nancy) is the home of my favorite little Mirabelle plums. These little plums are incredible - sweet, tasty, flavorful and fragile. They are only around for a few weeks and rather expensive. I suspect they are too fragile and too scarce to really make it into the global food chain of exportation and unity and I am so grateful to live in a country where they are available to me for a few weeks every year. I buy big sacks of them whenever I see them in the summer and we eat them very fast.

Some people make tarts and jam from them but we always just eat them plain. They’re about the size of cherries and pure fresh fruit heaven! Each one usually packs the flavor of the best plum you’ve ever had - they’re fabulous. Unlike Quiche Lorraine or Macarons, you don’t need to hold yourself back with these treats around - delicious!

I read a bunch of different sites but think this New York Times article is among the best for those looking for more info.

I saw this ad a while back in an art magazine and ripped it out. I came across it today while cleaning some papers…

This is an ad from a campaign by the German Olympic Committee, and I had a hard time finding the image I wanted so there might be a problem with the copyright… So for the record, I think the campaign is fabulous and I’m not trying to steal anyone’s thunder, just get it out to more people…

Pretty striking, isn’t it?

I’ve gotten my act together and walked both days this weekend, which is something I *should* do every weekend, but somehow I often don’t. I also managed to walk for 30 min one day during the week, so for the first time in ages I actually met my exercise goal this week.

I started a new audiobook today too. My rule with the audiobooks is to ONLY listen to them when I walk - so on the metro and at other times I listen to my iPod it’s music or podcasts, but to move on with the story, I must move my body…

It was really nice today - sunny, warm-ish (around 50 F) and I even saw signs of Spring - little crocuses popping up in the park, showing their bright yellow sparkle against grass which is turning downright green! I LOVE Spring! Last night’s walk was also a mission to find Mexican products here in Paris. I walked to 3 addresses I’d found on the web, only one of which was valid. I bought chipolte peppers and jalepeno peppers and also some mole sauce. I just couldn’t bring myself to pay 7.50 euros (about $10) for a large can of refried beans… I am frustrated because I can’t find dried pinto beans here ANYWHERE, and the rumors that I’ll be able to find black beans aren’t looking too good either. So I’m mixing my exercise and my quest together for a series of excursions to some exotic food markets hoping to track down the suckers to have a steady supply for the future. For short-term, I have a friend visiting in February, and my brother in April, and both of them will bring me the stuff I ask for, but long-term I’d like to find a local source. The walks are also a fun way to combine exploring the city with exercise, and since I’m really determined to find these things, gives me something to look forward to…