Forty minutes of pain

My newest workout at the gym is what I call "Forty minutes of pain". It's really refreshing. What that involves is forty minutes on the stair climber. I have recently bumped this up to forty. It used to be thirty-eight, and I will still do shorter time periods when I don't feel up to the forty, or when my time doesn't allow me to complete forty minutes. But today, I did the forty and it was forty minutes of pain. I began the routine doing 71 steps per minute, then increased by 1 step every four minutes, until I got to 28 minutes, after which I increased by one step every three minutes. My goal was to burn off 700 calories. I didn't quite make the 700 by the end of the forty minutes, but after about 44 minutes (the last four part of the cool down) the calorie counter registered 700 calories burned. I also burned a few after the stairclimbers as I did my abdominal workout today. Here are the vital statistics:

Minutes: a little over 44
Floors: 191 (at about 17 steps per floor)
Steps: 3247
Calories burned: 700 (maybe 75 more doing the ab workout)

There's one more statistic that's worth noting:

Pieces of pie burned off: two

So there you have it, I have burned off several pieces of pie since Thanksgiving, but still haven't burned off all of the pie and other things I've eaten. Thus go the holidays. I also have a much harder time making it to the gym to do said workout from about mid-November through the end of the year, simply because my job as a mailman gets pretty crazy during that time period.

The bottom line is that forty minutes of pain is worth it to me so that I can do the things I love, which includes eating.

Hiking: Porter Fork

I needed to get in a good leg/cardio workout today. I didn't want to go to the gym, and I had about an hour and a half this afternoon to do a little bit of hiking, so I headed for Millcreek Canyon. Some of the trails lower down in the canyon were packed, so I decided I'd hike up the paved, but gated, road at Porter Fork.

It was about 1.5 miles to where the road ended and I wanted to make it to that point before I turned around. For those who've never been up this trail, it goes through a cabin area and that's why it's gated. They don't want just anyone driving up there. The road itself is quite steep and I pushed it to get my heart and lungs working. The steepness would take care of the leg workout. Anyway, I began hiking at 2:23 pm and felt that I could hike until three and still make it home when I needed to be home.
The trail winds up the road past a beautiful stream, and through a nicely forested area around the cabins.

I ended up getting within eye shot of the pavement ending at 3:00, and took an extra couple of minutes to actually get to the dirt part of the trail.

Sign right where the pavement ends.

About 25 feet after the pavement ends the wilderness begins.

I only took my cheap camera--my phone--with which to take pics. Of course, that helped me to hike faster not having to pack my Canon digital SLR.
I've traveled this trail a few times in my life. When I was a kid, I came up it a couple of times in the winter to spend some time in a cabin that one of our Scout leaders owned. I also spent a night with a friend at that same cabin catching worms for our Scout week camp which was coming up the next week.

Could this have been the cabin I stayed in as a kid? I wasn't sure, but I thought maybe it was.

Later on, just a few years ago, I climbed the trail once alone, and once with a friend. It eventually links up with other trails leading down into Big Cottonwood, or over to Mt. Raymond and Gobblers Knob. The time I went with my friend, my friend's wife dropped us off at Porter Fork and then picked us up later in the day on the Big Cottonwood side. Today there were a lot of people up in the canyon for November 6th, but not tons of them on the same trail as me. That made it a little nicer. It was cool enough to wear a light jacket, but I had sweat coming off my forehead by the time I made it to the end of the pavement. I took time to notice on the way down how peaceful it was, and it smelled heavenly up there. A short adventure, but well worth the effort.

With late afternoon coming on, the distant peaks looked Beautiful

Always check your gym bag

Yesterday morning, I did my typical "sneak into the bedroom in the dark and grab the shirt and shorts out of the drawer and try not to wake Ann up" routine. I went into the other room and stuffed those two items, along with my shoes, into my gym bag.
After work, I arrived at the gym, stripped down and went to put on the clothes. The "shorts" that I had grabbed out of my drawer in the dark, ended up being Ann's capris! At that point, I had three choices. Either I could get dressed again in my work clothes and bag working out, I could wear Ann's capris to work out in, or I could put my mailman shorts back on and work out in those. I chose the last one. I actually had a pretty good workout too, doing my treadmill 5k in 31:10, which is my fastest time this year. Maybe I'll wear my mailman shorts all the time to work out in.

Exercise results this week

I haven't really lost much weight. Right now I'm at 191, so I think I've lost two pounds in the past three weeks. Of course, I had the kidney stones or something else that felt pretty bad this past week.
That being said, I got in a 13 minute HIIT workout on the treadmill on Friday. On Saturday, I went back to the gym and decided on the spur of the moment to see how fast I could do a 5k (3.1 miles) run. I thought I'd warm up for five minutes or for the first half mile, then run as fast as I could until I had reached 3.6 miles, then subtract the five minutes from my end time.
After the five minute warm up time, I decided that I wouldn't go 3.6 miles and subtract the time, but would include the warm up into the total, so I'd only have to run 3.1 miles--but my time would be tad slower because of warm up is done at a slower pace. I decided this because I was feeling a little tired (probably because of the HIIT workout the day before). So I ran the 5k as fast as I could and got done in 27:38, which is faster than I've run the same distance in the past two years at least. I wonder what I could have done had I not been tired!
Not to brag. I just felt pretty pumped about it.
(Oh yeah, for those who don't know, HIIT stands for High Intensity Interval Training.)

Health and fitness goals

This week, I began my outdoor running for the year. I'm kind of a wuss now, and I don't really like running outside in the winter anymore. Too much opportunity to slip on unseen ice and face injury, and for pete's sake, it can get just too darn cold.


My work schedule actually precipitated a complete change in my workout schedule. I now have to split my workout into running in the morning and strength training after work. It's either that, or give up writing in the mornings, which I'm loathe to do.


All of this is part of my goal to get to 184 by July 1^st. Right now, I weigh in at 193. It fluctuates though, because at the beginning of the week, I weighed 191, but yesterday, 193, and I haven't eaten a lot of food. The body normally fluctuates because of wather intake and other factors, so that doesn't worry me. For the past few weeks I'd been at 193-194, so the 191 kind of was an anomaly anyway.


My goal of 184 is one I chose because that's the lowest I've weighed in the past ten years or so and it was the weight I was at when I did the tremendous Half Dome hike in Yosemite National Park. It was the weight I was at when I felt the most in shape that I have been in in quite some time. I will shoot for that, even though I realize that weight actually is a bad way of figuring out general health. It is one way, one factor, and that is all. It's possible that since I'm concurrently doing strength training that I will build muscle which will add weight and my general fitness won't be expressed by a loss in weight. I'm allowing for the possibility and I will know if I'm in great shape or not regardless of my actual weight. I also expect to get my body fat percentage down below 15 percent. I'm really not a fanatic about getting my body fat percentage down to zero or close to it, especially after reading about this study a few years ago: Extra Weight Leads to Longevity, but a healthy lifestyle leads to greater happiness and greater resistance to injury and many kinds of diseases.


I'm a firm believer though that what we eat is more important than exercise in maintaining a healthy life, and in weight loss. I've already begun the diet transformation that will be a part of meeting my goal. I'm not going to totally cut out things that are bad for me, but they will be the exception and not the rule. For snacks, I will more often grab an apple or some other kind of fruit or vegetable, instead of grabbing a cookie or brownie. I'm beginning to train myself in doing so, and wise food choices are the real key to fat loss.


I will post my progress here from time to time.

A time dilemma

I'm not good with adjusting to schedule changes. Saturday, my work schedule changed from starting at 7:30, to starting at 7:00. This may not seem like much, and over all, I like the idea of getting off work a half an hour earlier, but it puts me in a dilemma. The dilemma is when to write and when to get my exercise in. About a year ago, we changed from an 8:00 starting time to a 7:30 starting time, and I still haven't fully adjusted, and now, I have to adjust again. I do my best writing in the morning, mainly because there are too many distractions for me when it comes to writing in the evening. On the other hand, going to the gym after work is harder, because sometimes I work overtime and the need to get home outweighs staying until 6:00 at the gym to complete a workout.


My workout is generally completed in an hour, but there is drive time, and doing it after work puts me in the middle of rush hour traffic trying to get home. I'm thinking that I'm going to end up splitting my workout and running in the morning (I will have to anyway once it gets hot), and then doing my strength training after work. Running in the morning will still allow me to write for a while, so I think that may be the best possible solution. I'll need to be disciplined to do it, especially since I will need to get up at a consistent time, but that will be possible. The only thing I worry about is running in the dark. I haven't done that for years, and don't have the reflective gear for it. Of course, that can be easily purchased.


So there will be that, and I'll also try to get some cooperation around here with doing some writing at night. My computer just may have to be off-limits to the grandkids and others unless I'm watching a game or movie, or playing a board game with Ann. Of course, this time of year brings a number of things that take away time that could be used for writing—yard work that must be done, and of course the outdoorsy stuff that I always do and that nearly always takes precedence.


I'm glad my time dilemmas are only between things I want todo and not between things that I have to do.