I didn’t write an update for Week 3 because it was a very busy one for me. My super adorable niece (seen below offering to share the cucumber she has been chewing with me) came to recuperate from her fever at our apartment and we ended the week with a quick holiday at the hillside. I meant to write a post, not just about running but about a few other things as well, but taking care of a teething 10-mo old baby is a full-time round-the-clock job. I don’t mind babysitting at all (in fact, I love babysitting) but man, carrying the baby around your hip even for as little as 10mins could feel like a second to forever. I definitely need stronger hips and steelier arms!
Here achik ijah, you can have my half-chewed cucumber. You look so thirsty. I don’t mind sharing :)
Then, once we came back from the hillside, boom! I was down with fever and was holed up in my room for 3 days. My first day of exercise for Wk 4 started yesterday; I intended to put in another session today but we went out in the afternoon and by the time we got home it was late and I had chores to do et cetera.
Tomorrow (well, today actually) I have an afternoon date with IMAX 3-D to watch Avenger Assembled. It’s 4:15am right now – looks like it’ll be an all-nighter for me – so the plan is to get all my chores done by 7am, do a quick HIIT then take a nap to make-up for lost sleep, lunch and then Avengers. Hopefully I can manage one more workout over the weekend to fulfill my min 3x a week quota. If there’s a will…
Here’s the update:
GEAR
- Neon Green is the New Pink. We went to Sunway Pyramid last week for coffee and cakes (in my defense I was walking a lot and carrying baby alternately so while I didn’t get to do proper exercise, it was a heck of a workout I assure you). There is this shop called Daiso, which is essentially a chain of the infamous 100 Yen Daiso shops in Japan, where everything in the store is 100 Yen! Ok, in Malaysia everything in the store is RM5. Surprisingly I found a selection of pedometers, what luck!, and this is what I got for myself:
Isn’t she a beaut? I am in love. It’s only RM5 and yes, battery included!
- This is a basic pedometer that counts steps continuously to 9999, then it resets back to 0. What I do is to reset it daily every morning before clipping it to the band of my pants (which is the correct way to place a pedometer though sometimes I clip it anywhere convenient). It is recommended to walk 10,000 steps a day, which is equivalent to 5K. I have only gone up as far as 5,000 steps/day but to be fair I don’t wear the pedometer all the time and clipping it to my tank top apparently doesn’t make the counter move. Still gonna be a while before I will remember to clip the pedometer on habitually like wearing underwear but I’ll get there. (I can’t believe I am so excited about this little piece of gadget that I devoted 2 paras writing about it!).
- Anyway, I also bought 2 sports bras and 2 pair of leggings from Daiso, and for good measure since I do intend to wear the pedometer all the time, a pair of spare batteries. All in all the damage totalled RM30. Daiso is officially, definitely my favourite shop of the year.
FOOD & BEVERAGE
- Carbs Overload. As I wasn’t full-on exercising, I only had one protein shake last week (and none this week yet). But this is what I realized: I eat way too much carbs. I know that there is no good food or bad food, but not taking the protein shake made me realized how little protein I eat naturally in my daily diet and, more alarmingly, how carbs feature way too prominently. I do not have cholesterol problems so what I have been doing is to take two half-boiled eggs to make up for my protein intake. The more important step to take is to cut down my carb to comply to the recommended daily intake, so if that means I have to use a cup to measure how much rice to eat every day, I will use a cup. It will be tough to give up carbs, perhaps tougher than giving up table sugar, but it is bothering me a lot so I need to take charge and do something about it.
EXERCISE
- Stopwatch Function! I just discovered, much to my embarrassment, the stopwatch function on my phone. What a nifty little helper. I try to keep on moving continuously for a minimum of 30mins – using a stopwatch is a lot more precise than using songs to measure time (a song is roughly 4 mins, so 7-8 songs were my indication that 30mins had passed). If I can move longer than that, bonus. It also helps me greatly when doing HIITs.
- Daydreaming Makes It Fun-ner. When doing HIITs, it is very easy for me to tire out. So, these days I imagine that I am a fitness instructor teaching a class of rookies on how to do HIITs. As I do the routine, I talk out loud to take myself through it (as if I was literally talking to a class). As the instructor, I can’t stop/cheat so I don’t. I know it sounds loco but it helps me to stick to the reps in the proper amount of time and rests. Whatever works :)
- Gym-much? My sister asks me if I’d contemplate joining a gym so that I can have access to machines that are too cumbersome (read: bulky and takes up space) to buy and put at home. There is a gym at the hotel nearby – the fees are reasonable and it is halfway between home and my sister’s workplace so we are thinking of joining together and do our sessions in the morning (after sending the kids to school, before heading to work). Sounds like a plan. I think it is great if I can log in 30mins in the gym every morning (on the elliptical and/or weight machines) and then another 30mins of running (or HIIT) later in the evening 3x a week. I used to run for more than an hour at a time, and I coupled that with weightlifting and spinning so I would easily spend up to 2-hr non-stop at the gym. These days it is hard to do 2-hr at a go, no reason except for my own inadequacies, so if I can break it up into a morning and evening session daily – great! I have a lot of work to do and a lot of abuse to undo so I am quite excited about the prospect. It is still just a plan at the moment, we’ll see if it happens.
No photo for Week 3, so here’s the comparison between Week 2 and 4. Not much (physical) difference but check out the pedometer on my shirt, man :)
(p/s: I am doing a separate post on runs happening in and around KL/SEL after this. I haven’t forgotten to add that in, I just haven’t gotten around to checking the calendar yet. Just wanted to post this first).
