Fitness: Energy Levels
I’m not feeling very well today because I ate a couple of things yesterday that my body apparently no longer likes. One of those is cookies. I had two little cookies at a get-together at work, and my stomach rebelled for hours. In fact, I spent the entire night tossing and turning with sharp belly pains, and ended up in the bathroom most of the night. Yuck. I went in to work for about 3 hours this morning and decided I just couldn’t hack it and had to go home. Got all my reports completed and then called it good. Now I’m home taking it easy.
However, yesterday was interesting. I woke up at 5am, after exactly eight hours’ sleep. This is extremely abnormal for me. I am generally very difficult to wake up in the morning, and often my body needs 9-10 hours sleep in order to function. When I woke up yesterday, I was rarin’ to go. I got ready and hopped on the bus. I noticed in my walk between buses I was MUCH faster than in previous days. I also found myself walking incredibly fast through the halls at work. In fact, at around 10am, I was about to jump out of my skin. I just had so much energy, and had nowhere to put it. I work a desk job with quite a bit of responsibility, and can’t just go run laps around the building, much as I was tempted yesterday. Finally at about 10:30 I decided I’d had enough of the antsy-ness and agitation, and took the stairs up three floors to the company gym. (Yes I am extremely lucky; I realize this)
I arrived at the gym, changed and put my hair up, and went out onto the floor fifteen min before my appointment with my trainer. I hopped on the treadmill and started walking. I figured “hmm, not so fit yet, maybe 2MPH.” WAY too slow. The automatic setting based on my weight was also significantly too slow. I set it to manual, and bumped it up til I had a comfortable stride going…. at 3.5 MPH. That is as fast as my sweetie walks! After 5 minutes or so, my trainer came over and said she was ready early, so we could start as long as I’d done five min on the treadmill. I did a couple more minutes and then we did my routine. Finished in ten minutes. I was still amped, so she took me back to the Cybex machines and to the free weights and added a few new exercises to my routine. I told her about the energy spike, and she said that she’d try to tire me out enough to settle it down a bit, but to be prepared for later as I’d either completely crash or I’d have an even bigger spike.
Fortunately, neither of those ended up being the case. I just maintained the high energy level throughout the day.
On my way home, I tried something new. I took the shuttle van to our other office, and hopped off and walked to the bus that would take me home. Lo and behold, I was there at the same time as I would be had I taken the regular bus! It’s only a half-mile walk. I will, next week, see if I can’t walk the entire way to my bus. It’s 1.6 miles, with very little elevation change except for the extremely steep hill at the end. That hill is always my last little push. I think I’m ready to walk the whole route, as my lunchtime walks are 1.5 miles.
I’ll have to put on the pedometer this weekend and see if I can relatively easily do 1.6 miles. Part of my problem is that when walking alone I tend to crank up the speed a little too much, and end up with sore calves and shins. It’s not a *bad* sore, but it’s enough to slow me down a little the following day. I need to consciously focus on walking slightly more slowly on longer walks. I also need to find my backpack. My current briefcase just isn’t practical for walking. It tends to cramp my neck; it is essentially a large shoulder-bag that doesn’t stay on my shoulder very well as it’s leather.
I’m seeing major improvements in just two weeks. The trainer suggested that my body has been craving this, as I was a bit of a jock when I was younger – softball, tennis, swimming, bodyboarding, even a stint on the track team. I’m definitely feeling like my body is gearing up for this much more quickly than I had imagined it would. It feels really good.
