This past weekend I got back up on the horse that through me…Highway 14 up Poudre Canyon. This time I rode with my husband. We used to ride all the time before we had kids. Now we needed visiting grandparents to take care of the kids to enable us this gift of a ride!

Instead of starting partway up the canyon like I did last time, this time we started at our house. We rode 14 miles before we even got to the canyon. It was a nice warmup, but I felt so slow riding next to my husband. I’d be huffing and puffing away and he’d be casually sitting up, riding with no hands. I told myself over and over again not to compare myself to him, but it never quite took. It’s quite amazing how quickly all the visions I had of myself as “strong” and “fast” disappeared when there was someone “stronger” and “faster” right in front of me. Yes, yes, my husband is perpetually fir and use to road race, but still…compare, compare, compare. I couldn’t help it.

But in the end, I must have been strong. The entire ride was 24 miles and it took us less than two hours. When it was over and we had finished the last, steep climb, I must have been in the midst of a biker’s high. It felt like a 20 minute ride, not a 2 hour ride, and I didn’t have clear memory of much of it. And I wasn’t tired! My legs weren’t burning and I felt like I could get right on the bike and keep going.

It was a great, successful day, and I hope to repeat it again soon.

Getting to the gym hasn’t been quite as successful. I’ve missed a few days because of being sick and a few more because it just felt good to sleep in on vacation. My kids are back in school on Wednesday and we’re all getting back to an early schedule. I’m recommitting to three days a week in the gym…at 6 am…ugh.

My doctor said, ironically, that the best exercise for me was cycling, since it has zero impact on the hip.The abrasion took a long time to heal, though, and moving the leg in a cycling motion tugged at the scabs. Not a pleasant thing. I also slightly reinjured my hip by…wait for it….bowling. Picture yourself bowling. The last step before you release the ball is basically a lunge. Also not pleasant.

But tonight I was back on the bike and had a great ride. 25 miles in the early evening, in just under 2 hours. I felt great once I’d warmed up, and I easily climbed some short, steep sections that would have stopped me in my tracks before this fit journey. I actually accelerated up the last hill of the evening. Few things have felt better.

Wednesday I’m going to try the gym again. Wishing myself luck!

Not so this time…I started going through my closet looking for  a skirt, a nice pair of pants…anything! But I was in for a surprise. Everything I tried on was too big. Some skirts were so big that they quite literally fell off me onto the floor. Wonderful, yeah, but quite frustrating when a night out is waiting for me!

I eventually did find something — a too-big skirt that was hidden by a long shirt. It was disappointing that the outfit didn’t quite show off the new body I have just discovered.

For now, I am buying clothes at the thrift stores — I cleaned out my closet of all the too-big clothes, and I’m not even keeping them in the garage “just n case.”  That’s a big step — this might just be permanent, this change.

Whoah.

I needed to win the battle against inertia. It felt really good to sleep in those three days last week instead of waking up at 5:00 a.m. to get to the gym by 6:00. A few mornings I would actually wake up early anyway and watch the hour of the workout slip by. I was at the top of the slippery slope toward making excuses and quitting. Once you’ve skipped a workout, for whatever reason, it’s just easier to skip the next.

When I went back to the gym Monday I simply explained the crash and injury to my trainer and she adapted the program — putting em on a selection of arm exercises. My heart rate never got anywhere near the training zone. I think my max was 112, but this workout wasn’t about being in the zone or burning body fat or even building muscles.

Sometimes, showing up is enough.

So, no, I didn’t go to the gym today! Still unsure about Wednesday–it all depends on when I emerge from the pain cave.

Road rash/bruise. Crash on July 18.

As I learn more and more about my body, I’m learning how things like stress and not getting enough sleep have an affect on my workouts. No matter what I did or what kind of adjustment I made, I could not get my heart rate to stay in the all-important training zone (for me, that’s 137-157 beats per minute.)

Stress puts strain on your heart. When you’re tense or stressed out, check out the effects:

How your heart is affected by stress
Stress affects your cardiovascular system in several ways:

1. Heart rate increases.
2. The rate of blood flow speeds up, increasing blood pressure.
3. The release of fatty acids into the bloodstream for energy increases cholesterol and triglyceride levels.

(Read the complete article about stress and your heart at http://www.hearthealthyonline.com/heart-disease-overview/stress-management/stress-effect-on-heart_1.html)

Seeing as how my stress was pretty major — I had lost hours of sleep the night before thinking about the camp — it’s no wonder that my heart rate jumped every time I did any sort of activity. It was primed and ready to take the “flight” option of “fight or flight,” which stress triggers.

So I felt as if I were back at step 1 — the early workouts where I spend lots of time lying on the floor doing hip-ups because my heart rate was too high. I had gained a lot of fitness since those early workouts, and I was hardly ever sitting out exercises anymore, but this day I felt like I was back at square 1.

My trainer kept trying to tell me to “leave everything at the gym door” and focus on the workout, but I found it impossible. In the middle of a set of reps I would start thinking about whether or not the camp schedule allowed enough play time for the kids. The heart rate monitor kept track of every rise above 157….beep, beep, beep.

I was so discouraged at the end of the workout that I couldn’t even muster that feeling of, “At least I went to the gym,” that’s a good balm for bad workouts. I skipped the next workout, convinced that the awful Monday workout would just repeat itself on Wednesday. By Friday I was back in the gym and feeling strong, heart rate in the zone. And why not — it was the last day of camp.

Skill set to work on? Leaving regular life locked in the car in the parking lot.

Skill set achieved: getting back in the saddle after a major disappointment. That moment on Monday, driving home, was the perfect opportunity to say, “I quit” and never come back.. I didn’t though…and 5 days later I did an intense 25-mile ride up the Poudre Canyon. More about that next time.

I’ve done other weightloss programs before. I am a four-time loser at Weight Watchers. I have had and wasted 5 gym memberships, and I have a whole stack of workout clothes in my closet. I have overeaten, undereaten and not eaten at all. Everything was successful, at first, but it was impossible to maintain. Up, down. Down, up.

I thought I had the answer, just not the willpower to mailtain it: Eat Less, Move More. Seems completely obvious. But I was really only into half of it. The Eat Less half, of course. Moving more was going to happen after I lost the weight. Some plan.

So you can imagine how shocked I was when, after my second workout, Coach Ryan sat me down and talked to me about food. I’d been tracking all of my meals, snacks and nibbles on mycaloriecounter.com. I thought I had done poorly. The first day I ate about 1350 calories, the next day about 1250 and the third day about 1300 again. I had always heard that the ideal calorie count for losing weight was 1200 calories a day, and I was over the mark. But this is what Coach Ryan said…

EAT MORE

You read that right. Eat more, but eat better. Ryan told me that my optimum calorie range, once my fitness improved, was 1600-1800 calories. 400 more calories a day than I thought was correct for me. And right away, as soon as I started training, I was to increase my calorie count to 1500 a day, but there were rules. Those calories had to be 50% protein, 30% fat and 20% sugar.

Translated, that equals 183 grams of protein, 50 grams of fat and max of 50 grams of sugar.

You’d think a fat girl being told to eat more food each day would be like winning the lottery – I didn’t get fat because I have an aversion to food. It didn’t work that way, though. Getting that many grams of protein was almost impossible, especially without getting the fat and sugar grams out of whack. One yogurt in the morning was 12 grams of sugar and about 6 protein.

Coach Ryan suggested protein shakes and protein bars, which ended up being the perfect solution for me. I get to have chocolate milk and chocolate-covered bars every day and still be within my diet. I’ve also found cookbooks for diabetics to be helpful – they’re high on protein and (obviously) light on carbs. Try www.diabetic-recipes.com.

Why eat more? To fuel our bodies, yes, but to make our bodies use the fuel WE want our bodies to use – body fat. More on that next time in “getting in the heart rate zone”.

Of course, increasing my calorie intake would be stupid if I also weren’t increasing my output. I’m at the gym three days a week @ 6a.m., and I don’t want to waste those workouts because I didn’t eat right.

I’ve never been a weight loss success story, and it hasn’t been for a lack of effort. I have joined three gyms, two of them twice, and let the memberships go mostly unused. I have done group diets like Weight Watchers, only to resent the cost and quit, convinced that I could do it on my own for free. Somehow I never realized the irony that if could have done it alone, I wouldn’t be in need of a program in the first place.

This week I started yet another weight loss journey, and I have more confidence in my success than ever before. I joined a small gym (Educational Fitness Center/Crossroads Fitness Center — not sure which name you want to use) in Loveland –just a short 15 minute drive from my house in central Fort Collins. Unlike all the gyms I have joined before, this one provides personal training, in a group setting, for everyone who joins.

But it’s not that scary one-on-one personal training that can be intimidating. There are no half-dressed refugees from Muscle & Fitness walking around, just really personable, fun trainers who split their attention between 10-12 clients at a time. They know your name, they know your goals and they encourage everyone to do their best workout – not to reach some pie in the sky standard. Let’s face it – most large gyms couldn’t care less if you walk in the door or not, so it’s easy to quit.

I’ll admit that I was very nervous about entering the gym last Friday. I had been stressing about it all of Thursday. Would it be intimidating? Would I be judged severely for my obvious lack of fitness? Would I be able to do the workout without embarrassing myself. Was this the right way for me to achieve my weight loss goal – a not insignificant 40 lbs.

When I walked in the door of the Educational Fitness Center, several things put me at ease right away:

• I was welcomed warmly as soon as stepped in the door
• When I filled out my health profile with my weight loss and goals, I was told they were reasonable, really
• The program is easy to understand and was explained in layman’s terms – no gym rat jargon here
• Everyone does the same workout, but at their own level, and the workout is geared to weight loss

I am not yet ready to report any successes, aside from the fact that I did indeed complete the first workout successfully with only one day of soreness afterward. (Okay, yes, I was really sore, but it only lasted one day, I promise!)

My commitment is to go to the gym three days a week from 6 a.m. – 7 a.m. for as long as it takes to reach my goals. I know I’ve been here before, the start of a journey that I’ve never managed to complete, but this time the path seems much more clear, and I have the entire Educational Fitness Center team behind me – the trainers and the other clients – together, there’s no goal we can’t reach.