Welcome to another edition of Fitness Monday, a community series for health and fitness support.
I'm going to put this right up top, because the calendar for future hosts is currently wide open. If you'd like to host, hop on over to Gmail and sign in as FitnessMonday. Pw is exercise. Click on the calendar, pick a Monday and claim it with your username.
Obligatory disclaimer: I'm a librarian not a doctor... don't mistake me for a health professional... please be sure to get advice from your own doctor before making big health-and-fitness changes.
My diary today is a "why did you start" story, at 6 months into a serious attempt at getting fit. The short answer to "why did you start?" for me is:
Cosmic convergence.
So here's me: 41 years old, mother of 2 (elementary & preschool), have a bike-commute to my part-time job that keeps me in some sort of shape when the weather is good and the days aren't too short.
This fall I was bemoaning the upcoming seasonal hiatus of my bike commute, which cuts off at the Daylight Savings Time switch, since the switch puts my trip home into post-sunset hours and I'm unwilling to bike in traffic after dark. And sooner or later the snow begins to fall, the temperature plummets, and I turn into a winter pudding, egg-nogged on by holiday after holiday.
But just about then, one of my bloggy pals announced that she was going to start training for a half-marathon, and challenged her readers to join her. I mentally cheered but couldn't see my way clear to putting in that kind of time. (Always some excuse, right?)
And then, I read this column by Dr. Not-The-Surgeon-General Gupta in Time magazine called Run For Your Lives. He described a Stanford University study that began in 1984 to follow a cohort of middle-aged (50+) runners and a control group of healthy non-runners. 21 years later:
Data from the Stanford study, which was recently published in two peer-reviewed journals, show that the runners did not have higher rates of osteoarthritis and total knee replacements. And the onset of disabilities appeared 12 to 16 years later in the runners' group vs. the nonrunners'. That's huge; imagine living independently or delaying the use of a cane for an extra decade or more. There were also half as many deaths in the runners' group than in the nonrunners' during the study.
The librarian side of me hastens to add: here are citations and links to abstracts for the journal articles.
Reduced disability and mortality among aging runners: a 21-year longitudinal study.
Chakravarty EF, Hubert HB, Lingala VB, Fries JF.
Arch Intern Med. 2008 Aug 11;168(15):1638-46.
Long distance running and knee osteoarthritis. A prospective study.
Chakravarty EF, Hubert HB, Lingala VB, Zatarain E, Fries JF.
Am J Prev Med. 2008 Aug;35(2):133-8
Hmmm!
And then, my sister-in-law, who keeps a running blog, posted a link to this neat training program called Couch to 5K that she was going to use to get back into running shape after an injury had sidelined her for a while. This one has been mentioned in previous Fitness Mondays; it's 30 minutes of workout, three times per week. You start out with intervals of jogging 60 seconds and walking 90 seconds. Week by week you jog more and walk less, and in 9 weeks or so (depending if you repeat weeks or not), you work your way up to 5K.
Now that sounded do-able!
And THEN! I was driving my kiddos on an errand somewhere and had mis-parked our old decrepit stroller just enough that I crunched it with the car on my way out the driveway. The very next day after I had deprived us of stroller capacity, a neighbor down the street asked if I could use a jogging stroller that he wanted to get out of his storage shed now that his kids had far outgrown it.
This, my friends, is why I attribute my most recent fitness efforts to cosmic convergence. It was a beautiful thing.
I was originally just going to train up to 5K on my own, no racing involved. But then not long after I had started the training (which turned out to be just perfect for my capabilities), I linked up with a friend from church who wanted to train for a 5K as she approached her 40th birthday. Her goal was to actually run races and see if she could better her time. So we signed up for a race together, a fun-run on Valentine's Day. My first goal was to cross the finish line at all; my secondary goal was to average an 11:00 minute per mile pace. I came in with a per-mile pace of 10:42! Not speedy by any means, but for me, it was awesome.
My next race is for more than just fun. My friend and I have signed up for the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure at the end of May. So many people near and dear to me have fought for their lives against breast cancer, from my step-mother to my mother-in-law to my sister-in-law to my college roommate and more. If you'd care to support the cause and help my run make a difference, please drop by my fundraising page... every little bit helps.
I've been loving the excuse to get outside, and how I feel after a run, and how my shape has been gradually changing and my jeans have been fitting.
Even more striking, though, was what happened over the winter in terms of my health. My household is always a hotbed of colds and bronchitis and ear infection and strep, most of which we blame on what the kids bring home. I'm usually visiting the doctor begging for antibiotics for bronchial infection at least once over the winter, if not more.
This year, my husband and kids had the usual round of winter illness. Me? I didn't need a single sick day off work for myself. I fought off cold after cold, and the only one I actually caught was more annoying than debilitating. None of the usual hacking and misery and antibiotic-begging. And my annual seasonal-affective doldrums were unusually mild. If it was coincidence, it was a pretty startling one.
Now that it's spring again, I've picked up my bike commute once more, 4 miles each way, 3 days a week (when the weather holds), which makes a good alternate-day lower-intensity counterpoint to the running. One of these days I'll take the bus to work and RUN home! I also need to put some upper-body work in there somewhere. Haven't quite figured out the rhythm of where that fits just yet, though I did pull out an old video that does an upper-body thing with exercise bands. Might be what I need.
In addition to the Couch to 5K, here are a couple of freebie websites that have helped me put things together:
MapMyRun
This Google-Maps mashup lets you trace your route on a map and figure out how far you're going. The basic utility is free, though you can register & pay for extra features.
There's also a MapMyRide, MapMyWalk, MapMyHike, MapMyFitness, and MapMyTri.
SparkPeople
Fitness & weight-loss is easier in community (this diary series as its own Exhibit A)! SparkPeople is replete with message boards and e-mail reminders and articles and trackers for exercise and diet planning. I'm not really "doing" the SparkPeople program, but I've found some useful articles there, including an interval-training workout for my treadmill days. Food is a bigger struggle for me right now than exercise. But that's a whole 'nother jar of Nutella.
When I'm treadmilling at home, I rely on music to help me keep pace. Here are a couple of sites that help you find songs at the pace you run or walk:
JogTunes ("Music at Your Speed")
Running Music Mix
So, what got YOU to start whatever fitness work you're doing?
Or... what would it take to GET you to start?