Tales of a Thursday

  This day. Well. This day has not been my favorite because it is now 3 PM and I am barely just NOW having a moment to breath.  Kind of.  I have other stuff I should be doing but instead I really want to get this written out and posted.  So there.  I spent the entire day in the car running around picking up and dropping off stuff and it sucks.  Let me tell you it sucks to spend hour upon hour in a car. True story. 

So let me go ahead and back this train up to yesterday and start where we last left off in the oh so not compelling life of Emily.  I did not want to go to the gym. Shocking. I went to the gym anyway, less shocking.  I got on the treadmill and ran at a very comfortable easy pace and knocked out 4 miles.  Perfectly acceptable.  Afterwards I hit up the good old strength training class and honestly I was so sore, like everywhere that it wasn’t that good of a workout.  I barely burned any calories in the 45 minute class but it did make my muscles ache so I guess that is good.

So yes, this was day 10 in a row of exercise and clearly my body is getting ever so slightly more exhausted every single day and its clearly time for me to take a rest day. Which IS happening today. Yup, no workout tonight for me.  We have decided to leave for camping tonight so after work I rush home and get things ready so that hopefully as soon as Chris gets home we can pretty much leave.  This means today will be a rest day. SOOOO needed.  And then tomorrow both Chris & I will get up and run some distance because I cannot go 3 days in a row without exercise and I will be taking Saturday off as a rest day so that I am fresh for Sunday’s half marathon.  So basically in a nutshell after 10 days of going super freak mode at the gym, the next 3 days will be very light. Almost exercise void.  I will only get in 1 run of some amount, not really sure.  That seems barely worthwhile but whatever.  Even I must rest at some point.  I can’t go forever and ever truly. Unfortunately.  Actually it really is time for a rest day and my body already feels a sense of relief that it is going to occur today.

Anyway, if I back her up earlier than say even my workout last night, these things occurred in the good old land of Instagram.  Cute Victoria Secret Capri leggings and a monster energy drink.  And then at lunch yesterday it was Jiffy Lube oil change time. Because that does need to happen on occasion or else I run the risk of destroying a second engine in my life due to lack of oil.  That happened in my early twenties. Oops.

So let’s talk about another reality all together.  Last night my grandma passed away.  Yup, just about 2 months after my grandpa died, my grandma left us last night.  Now I am not going to lie here and pretend that I was at all close to my grandma.  We were not.  Quite honestly she wasn’t the nicest lady ever.  But that doesn’t mean that I am not sad by the news. Mostly sad because my mom and aunts and uncles are once again being put thru the ringer and traumatized.  Especially by the closeness of the passing of both of their parents.  That is hard.  That is way harder than it should be.  I am sad for them. I am sorry they have lost so much in such a short period of time.  It’s devastating for them.

With all that being said, I am in a very much in a weird place with my family. Family drama you know. In fact I really got into it this morning with my sister via text. NOT good.  Basically lately everyone is telling me what I should be doing and how to be act and behave and it’s kind of crap.  So often they don’t understand or support my lifestyle and yet they have expectations of me and are upset and gossip about me when I choose to not participate from time to time.  Frustrating stuff.  Basically in a nutshell it’s the same shit I’ve dealt with pretty much my whole “fit” life.  Because not a single one of them is healthy or lives a healthy lifestyle, only perhaps occasionally dabbling it in before fizzling out, they can’t/don’t/won’t accept that this is who I am.  That this is a very big part of my life and the happiest I have ever been.  It’s like unless I am the fat unhappy girl who watches movies and binge eats I don’t fit in.  It’s always been that way.

My sister actually told me this morning via text that she wished there was more of the “old Emily”  referring to the girl who spent her life watching movies honestly because she was escaping her sad reality that she could not actively participate in life so instead lived vicariously thru the movies.  Instead I am actually living my life now.  Ugh. Just ugh.  I hate it when this becomes an issue. It always becomes an issue.  I pull farther away because it becomes more and more apparent that my lifestyle is not supported at all. I have always been and forever will be the black sheep of the family. I pretty much accept that but it still sucks getting put thru the ringer because of it. 

So there you have it.  Complicated.  It’s all just complicated.  So this morning I woke up and was like whatever happens happens right. We are supposed to be going camping with my extended family actually. This is the big annual family camping trip.  Like where my mom and her brothers and sisters and my cousins go.  This will get interesting I am sure.

So I woke up and weighed myself.  Here is the one highlight of the day.  Do you want to know what the scale said…I weighed myself 3 separate times just to double and triple check you see… and it was 141.3. 

Yes, 141.3

This would equate to a whopping 2.5 pound loss from last week.  It was time of the month you know and I think last week I might have been retaining water that suddenly decided to flush out this week.  So there you have it.  141.3.  How did this happen?  Oh yeah, it happened form an insane amount of hard work and dedication and determination.  It happened from wanting it. It happened from working for it.  It happened from loving myself and eating.  Yes, I eat.  We all do see how close that number is to the magical 140 number right?  What is magical about 140? Nothing REALLY that magical but it’s the forever tentative weight watchers assigned goal weight.  It’s like the TOP of the range for a woman of my height but nonetheless this has always been the number I’ve strived for.  And there it is, within 1.3 pounds grasp.

I think I am certainly going to hit that by Maui.  Obviously.  Unless something gets REALLY fucked up in the next 8 weeks.  But that would have to go terribly wrong and as I see it, not happening. My head is screwed on very tightly these days and my marathon training plan is in full effect and I am hitting every single run.  That is just the kind of obsessive compulsive girl I am.  Every single run will occur.  And thank God for Chris.  He is sometimes my worst enemy ,but more often than not my best friend and biggest supporter.  He is fully in this marathon game now too and he is kind of the only one who gets my crazy goals and dreams right now.  He supports me and encourages me and makes me better as a result. 

So this was my photo collage from this morning.

And then my crazy day happened. I ate breakfast (coffee with oatmeal), I ate my morning snack (rice cakes with peanut butter), and somehow I forgot that I was going to be running around town all freaking day and didn’t properly have lunch in my car.  I was starving and as a result was INSANELY crazy.  I stopped at GNC to pick up some quest bars where I immediately scarfed 2 of them down the hatch.  Oops.  I say oops because I probably shouldn’t eat that many in one sitting but boy was I hungry. And after consuming them I felt much better. I needed the nutrition and the protein.  And clearly this is the reason such bars are designed.  For people literally on the go, who would otherwise make horrific decisions.  So instead of stopping at any said fast food place I ate 2 quest bars that totaled like 350 calories or something like that.  Um, not really a bad choice honestly.  After eating them I felt instantly better.  My stomach quit growling and the negative monster in my head shut up a bit.  Starvation is a bitch and I don’t recommend it to anyone.  It makes you a nasty miserable person.

But I was like seriously, I shouldn’t be starving. I ate lots of good foods. Oh well, right?  Some days you are just hungry. Going to caulk it up to my muscles growing and making gains and my body needing all of that nutrition.  Lots of exercise as of late and my body does need equal parts rest and fuel to recover properly.  At this moment in time I am going to go over my caloric intake for the day as a result but a few days of conscious over eating of somewhat quality foods is not really a big deal to me.  I didn’t eat a bag of chips or something else with no redeeming qualities.  At least quest bars have lots of things that my body can use.  Oh and I got energy drinks too, because well, they are like juice.  I joke that my body runs off them and instead of water, energy drink is pumping thru my veins.

So that pretty much leads me to right here, this moment in time.  And the reality that its 3:30 PM and I have got 1.5 hours left of work and then I get to go home for more go, go, go action.  I will stop at Subway on the way home to pick up dinner for Chris & I, to take camping with us so that we don’t starve ourselves and still eat something better than crap.  Then I get to not only pack up my clothes but also the groceries and such for this weekend and try to get as much as possible in order so that when Chris gets home we get to immediately leave. It’s going to be a late night but fortunately we don’t have any major plans for tomorrow so we can sleep in, eat a little something and then I must go for a nice run tomorrow. It WILL happen. Because as I’ve been preaching for a while now, my head is in this game and I will succeed.  I have goals that mean everything to me right now and I’m going to achieve them.

We are leaving camping Saturday evening so that we can go home, recoup for just a bit, eat a nice carb loaded spaghetti dinner and then head out Sunday morning nice and early for a half marathon.  I get another crack at the 13.1 mile distance after last week’s crazy intense, hot, not so feeling good one.  I have no illusions or expectations of time.  I just want to keep it around the 2:15-2:20 mark and I’d be happy.  It’s all just training for the big day you know.  Okay, I swear that’s all I got for now.