Wellness Update

My brother and I after Soldier Field 10 Mi.
I am the rounder shaped one.

As part of my goal to model being a life long learner to my students and staff I have dedicated one day a week in this blog to chronicle my journey to wellness in which I am attempting to get healthy and learn more about myself in the process.  Last week's post was a rundown of how out of shape I am, not as bad as I feared but definitely not good.  This week I am hoping to explain what I learned about myself during this process in week 1.

So here I go, things I learned last week:

• 5:15 AM is really early in the morning, and seemingly harder when I know after my 30 minute drive I will need to work out, as compared to when I left at that time as a swim coach and only had to put others through a rigorous workout.

• I really like being on a rowing machine.  I had never done this before, and found it to be not as daunting as it first looked for someone who can be rhythm and co-ordination challenged.

• Working out is much better when you have someone there to push you.  This is true of any endeavor you take and a main reason why I like collaborating and working on teams.

• I still hate running on treadmills.  This was probably exacerbated by having to run at a 10 minute mile pace, or faster, after spending my summer running at a leisurely 10:30-11:00 minute pace, but the boredom and feeling of going nowhere still drives me nuts.

• I am really tied to following instructions.  Even though the 10 minute or less pace was incredibly challenging, I felt obligated to do it, as that is what they had programmed into my key card for a workout.  I am not so much of a slave to directions though that I did not cut the program short (at 20 minutes vs. the 30 they programmed) when I felt that I had gone as far as I could go.  It helped that I had been told that if I did interval training I would only have to do 20 minutes, otherwise who knows what might have happened.

• Eating only salad at lunch is boring.  And ultimately leads to me snacking as soon as school ends and raiding the chocolate stash in the School of Inquiry.  (Yes English teachers, I know not to start a sentence with And, but it the format of my bullets better than a comma and continuation of the previous thought).

• I need to get my staff to put a lock on the chocolate stash and not allow me to have the combination.  While I am willing to eat healthy, I am also too easily distracted from my goal by the soothing stress relieving properties of  the cocoa bean.

Results for the week:

1.5 lbs lost, no real workouts done, but 1 fitness test that I counted as a workout and 1 instructional period on how to use the equipment I also counted as a workout.