A new resolution: Maintenance

“The new year begins today” was my Monday, December 30, status update on Facebook. It struck me as interesting that I wanted to begin this year early, much as I wanted to ease into 2013 at a much slower pace. The past year was a year of tremendous joy, growth, and accomplishment. It also was a year where goals — as usual — fell a bit short. I don’t mind the fact that the goals fell short. My general belief is that if goals are not overly ambitious and perhaps just a bit beyond one’s personal reach they might not be goals worth pursuing at all.
With that in mind, I have great goals for 2014. I am looking forward to improving my performance in another Olympic Distance Triathlon and completing marathon #11. I am hoping to take part in a few more races, and I think I am finally in the kind of shape I have wanted to be in for the past decade or so. I look forward to doing a lot of writing, a lot of gardening, a lot of home cooking, and moving my body with swimming, bicycling, running, yoga, dancing, and weights workouts throughout it all.
So with all of this greatness on my agenda, I am eager to kick off the new year.

July 2010

One major challenge nags at me. For the past three years, I have weighed myself first thing each morning and meticulously logged the figure. Accompanying that practice has been renewed attentiveness to healthy eating, portion sizes, and a commitment to working out at least five and ideally six days a week. With all of this has come results: The first time I weighed myself on the scale that I bought at Bed, Bath, and Beyond in January 2011, I came in at 149.9. This morning, I weighed 119.0. My daily weigh-ins over the past four months have ranged between 114.0 and 119.0. For the first time since mid-2004, I am weighing in consistently at a level that nutritionists, doctors, and the American Medical Association considers healthy for a person of my size and build. Because I began Moving Your Body with a goal of beating back obesity, the fact that I have scored such a victory fills me with glee.

September 2013

But now comes the challenge of maintenance. I have learned over the past three years that I can eat in a healthy way, exercise in an enjoyable manner, and lose weight very very slowly. But now that the pounds have been shed — very, very slowly shed — will they stay off? Or, like 90 percent of those who lose lots of weight, will they slowly (or quickly) creep back?

The scientific responses to people’s failures to avoid re-gaining pounds that were lost is rather mixed. Some research suggests that diets — which are food deprivation practices, even when they are done in the most sensible manner possible — create a resistance against which the body rebels once given the freedom again to consume. Other studies have indicated that appetite levels soar following diets, for similar reasons.
My own personal history of weight losses and gains hasn’t been strong. I first lost a good amount of weight when I was in my early twenties; I lost the weight over the course of about three months and regained it over the next two years. I repeated that pattern in my mid-thirties and in my early forties. Now, entering my early fifties, I am wracking my brains to catalogue what I have learned about eating and exercise as well as such factors as stress, rest, and emotional balance out of a hope that I don’t see the pattern recur once again.
Many things have changed in my life over the course of these decades that could work in my favor. For the first time in my life, I am married and fairly settled in my career and life work. I also have either given up or rendered as very infrequent such less-healthy habits like drinking and going out often to eat. I grow a lot of my own food and enjoy living close to the land. I am much more willing to pass on a social outing in order to get in eight hours of sleep than I was in the past.
But I still worry. My weight-loss lows in late summer this year coincided with my triathlon and marathon training. I have seen these kinds of weight dips in the past while training for similar events, and often a slow creep upwards after. This leaves me to wonder if endurance events — which I truly enjoy even if I am not the fastest competitor — might work against a goal of attaining an overall healthy balance.
For now, I plan to do what I have been doing for the past three years: I will weigh myself daily and log my weight, along with my workouts and other such details as the day’s temperature, plantings, and whether or not I’m having my period. I will gather the data and see what comes up. My hope is that I’ll be writing a column one year from today, reporting that I managed to get my weight stabilized at a very healthy 114 to 115 pounds and that it appears to be holding steady.
But, of course, only time will tell.

Sinking Back Into the Swim

As the temperatures started dipping into the teens and single digits, I began counting the days until we’d be able to reactivate our membership in our local YMCA. My husband and I had put our membership on hold in October in order to pay off a debt. I figured we could take advantage of the long, crisp lovely fall weather that often characterizes this part of the country and go on long walks and outdoor runs. For the most part, we did. October was glorious and so were the first two weeks of November. I logged 100 miles in October and about 50 miles in the first half of November.

Then, reality hit. Very short days of limited daylight. Increasing chills. More than a few sub-freezing afternoons. I started adding layers to my outdoor running attire while fantasizing about the indoor workouts in the swimming pool and fitness rooms that I had enjoyed all through last winter and spring — workouts that had strengthened my body and toughened me up for the triathlon and marathon I completed in the summer and fall. I managed to log the additional 50 miles I needed to make November a 100-mile month, and I began longing for the swimming pool, partly because swimming is perhaps my first favorite sport and partly because of my ritual of warming myself up with a few minutes soak in the hot tub before lowering myself into the pool. The hot soak can magically melt any lingering chill in the body that the snow-fresh dry air of our Adirondack foothills can not.

The Y has been my secret survival strategy for three New York winters in a row. Besides the indoor pool, there is an indoor track, indoor fitness cycles, yoga rooms, weight room, gym, and wide array of classes. And there are the three wonderful words: steam-room, sauna, and hot-tub. In years past, it has been easy for me to imagine myself back in Hawai’i simply by warming my body in the sauna and hot tub.

And, so, the debt paid off, we rejoined the Y. I packed my swim suit, goggles, and a towel into my workout bag, and headed eagerly for the Y. On my first day back in the pool, I did the warm-water soak in the hot tub and then went into the pool. I began swimming laps — and almost immediately found myself facing what felt like an unfamiliar sensation: my body a ton of bricks, sinking into, not floating on top of the water.

I struggled to finish 200 yards, before climbing out of the pool and heading into the hot tub for another soak. 

“How was your swim?” my husband asked me in the sauna, where I retreated to next.

“Short!” I declared.

“Short?”

“Nasty, brutish, and short,” I said.

“Hey, who said that?” someone else in the sauna asked me.

“Hobbes, Thomas Hobbes,” I replied with a laugh. “It was in his book, The Leviathan, and described his outlook on life. But he also added in the word ‘solitary’. This swim was not ‘solitary’ in the least.”

I wondered why the swim felt as hard as it did. Was it the fact that it was not solitary? That the pool was crowded? That the man sharing a lane with me couldn’t keep to his side of the stripe, and kept hitting my shoulder with his hand whenever our swimming bodies crossed paths? That the members of the swim team who were practicing in all but two of the lanes had turned the pool water into a tumultuous pond of choppy waves with their vigorous strokes and kicks? That the music and shouting in the pool area seemed deafening? That it was the New Moon? Or was it the fact that my first favorite sport no longer was in my reach?

Almost all of these points seemed like flimsy excuses, except perhaps for the New Moon, which my husband immediately dismissed as “New Agey” though he did agree that the added darkness that accompanies a New Moon might have helped me make feel extra tired. Noise, choppy waves, and crowded lanes don’t usually bother me. And I couldn’t believe that I could be out of shape. After all, I had been running all through October and November, and had been doing wall sits and planks throughout the month of November to boot.

Then, I remembered the stories from other athletes on a Beginners Triathlete forum I had been following early last year. Many were entering swimming pools in January after a few months hiatus following their final triathlons from the fall. They reported feeling like walruses, overweight, clunky, out of shape, as if their bodies couldn’t move in the water with the elegant seal paces that swimming deserved.

I realized that, ahh yes, I was out of shape. Not in an overall sense. But I wasn’t in the peak triathlon training shape I had been just before the triathlon I did in August.

Prior to last year, I had been on and off with swimming for several years. I would start up a swimming routine for four to

six weeks, then something would interfered with my schedule or the local pool’s lap hours would change and I’d get thrown off. I’d shrug and come back months later, usually not too different — fitness wise — from where I had been before. I’d start with a few hundred yards, and add a little bit of mileage to each workout. But I rarely did more than 1,500 yards in a week.

This year has been different.  I began swimming consistently in mid-January, and by April was up to three or four swims a week. I was logging 4,500 yards a week, and by mid-summer had kicked the weekly yardage up to about 5,000. Even though I tapered off on the swims after the triathlon, I was still getting into the pool once or twice a week through August and September and logging about 2,000 yards a week.

And then I stopped. Because I had just run a marathon, I devoted October to a four-week recovery plan that had me running and walking five or six days a week and slowly building up mileage. I was running a lot, but I was not cross-training. Accordingly, some muscles in my body suffered.

So, I have realized that I need to take swimming slow. I need to start with a few hundred yards, or whatever my body feels it can handle and slowly rebuild from there.

Today, in the pool for swim number two in December, my body felt less like a ton of bricks and more like itself. I still felt that

 I struggled with strokes, but I also felt as if I were pulling and kicking more smoothly. I felt less like I was sinking and more like I was gliding over the water. I finished 1,000 yards in about half an hour, a bit slower than the peak pace from last summer, but good enough.

I climbed out of the pool, shook a few loose drops of water off, and headed for the hot tub and sauna for my second self-indulgent warming.

It felt as if I were on my way back.