Okay, so first of all, I am proud of myself today because even though I have been sooo tired lately, I managed to get myself out the door and walk my usual park loop. I have been feeling kind of run down for the past few days, so I was really tempted to just fall into bed and take a nap. Instead, I made a deal with myself: "I'm just going to put on my walking gear and my sneakers and if I still want to just sit on the sofa, then that's what I'll do." It seems like such a small thing, just changing your clothes, but it really did get me moving out the door and down the street. I made a second deal with myself that I was just going to get started and do my warmup, and that got me to the park, around the loop, and back home. It was fantastic, and I got to feel proud of the effort I made instead of disappointed that I hadn't done anything at all (though since I promised myself, I definitely need to work on not being disappointed, even if I only put my walking gear on and sit on the sofa).
The thing that was weird about my workout, though, was that I realized during it that I am not walking right. I have been dealing with this achilles tendon soreness for weeks now and I think I finally realized that a problem in my stride is causing it. Once I realized this about myself, I tried to pay attention to how I normally walk, and it seems like my left leg does most of the work and then when I step on my right foot, it's at a weird angle that puts a lot of pressure on the far right heel part of my foot. I concentrated for a while on walking with both feet straight, heel-toe like in marching band, pushing off of the balls of my feet, and I started to feel fatigue in muscles I didn't even know I had! I wonder if the weird alignment of my legs and feet when I'm walking has anything to do with how ineffectual my flutter kick is when I'm swimming. I'm thinking about getting a pair of fins to train myself to kick better, btw.
So anyway, I searched online for some advice about the proper walking form, and it turns out that there are a lot more parts of my body working when I'm walking than just my legs and feet. Apparently it helps a lot to have a strong back and strong abdominal muscles so you can maintain good posture while you're walking. There is a great page on runnersworld.com that outlines some strength-building exercises for walkers, so I may try some of them next time I walk.
Sometimes I feel like this is getting so complicated...like I need to bring a little notebook with me or something that has all of the things I have to remember about walking, running, or swimming written down. I guess I should give myself a break. I'm trying to learn to do a whole lot of new things all at once...it makes sense that there is a learning curve.
In walking gear news, I finally got my replacement pair of awesome walking shorts in the mail, and they are super-cool, but may be a little too big for me already. Maybe I'll hold onto the pair that was too small since I will most likely shrink into them. It's only a size or two. Also, I went to The Apple Store in Pioneer Square Mall yesterday and bought myself my very own shiny green iPod Shuffle! I already love it so much, it is ridiculous. It is so teeny tiny and it just clips to my sweater when I am commuting or to my t-shirt when I'm walking. So unobtrusive, so fabulous! At first I thought I was going to have to buy all of the music I wanted to put on it from iTunes and I ended up spending 45 bucks last night on music, but today I found an application called Tunebite that will take the music I download from Napster to Go and rerecord it in a format that will work on my iPod. It actually works, and is legal, which is a good thing. Boy, I wish I had figured that out before I spent my 45 bucks!
Things are just okay at work lately. I find that my workload tends to not be as continuous as I would like and a lot of what I am doing depends on responses from other people, so I find that I have more time on my hands than I am comfortable with. I suspect that uneven distribution of workload is an issue in our department anyway, so maybe I'll see if I can figure out a good way to deal with that. I really don't like feeling like a slackass because I'm waiting for partners to respond to my emails and my colleagues are working like mad to get hardware out the door. Maybe I just need to stop being afraid of looking stupid and help the hardware guys out some more. Hmm...
Tomorrow it's more swimming! I'll keep you posted...:)
1 comment:
Sometimes, just buying new clothes to work out in is inspiring, I think. It's odd, but I guess I get bored sometimes with what I wear to the gym that I'll buy a new pair of shorts or look for some kind of t shirt to wear to help me geel motivated. It's strange. Last weekend I bought a pair of white gym shorts, and they're awesome. They're perfect, and were motivating enough to get me totally psyched for the gym the day I bought them. Whatever it takes, you know?
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