I LOVE MY HEART RATE MONITOR

Yes, I know, I've been terrible about updating this. But mostly I've just been busy offline, which is a good thing. The garden is pretty much fully planted now, but I haven't done nearly enough weeding or mowing, so it looks a bit like a meadow in parts. I've been playing the piano, going to the gym, and walking on the treadmill when I'm not working. I'm working most of the time, though, it seems.

I also went with some friends to see Batman the other night, which was much, much better than anticipated. Heath Ledger was amazing.

At any rate, in my attempts to get back into the shape I was in before my back went out, I've upped my "workouts" now to doing circuit training at the gym and now treadmilling at home. I will try not to get too terribly boring about this, but the idea is that since I injured my back, I've made progress to the point where I can now walk with a straight-ish back (this is new in the last two months), and I can stand up from a normal-ish chair without too much rolling around and looking for objects to push off from. (This is also new in the last two months.)

It's difficult being four years down the road from an injury and still trying to remind myself that this is still essentially physical therapy. I've put on quite a bit of weight from the whole immobility thing, and I'm trying to not get too wrapped up in that and instead focus on goals that are less rooted in self-hatred.

Because, let's face it, that's what most weight loss is about. Hate yourself now, and tell yourself that you can eat enough to have energy when you're thin and a lovable person again. Focus on how much you hate your body and how much it weighs, and keep this up for however long it takes you to lose the weight--after all, this self-hatred is what we like to call "motivation."

Everything about dieting is a negative. You're trying to get into lower numbers on the scale, lower sizes in your clothes, and in order to do this you need to engage in negative or non-behaviours. I am going to NOT eat. Not eating is an inaction, and you have to keep it up for a long time, and in order to continue to lose weight, you have to focus to some extent on not liking the weight you're in right now.

So instead, I'm working on positive goals. Goals that are based on action instead of inaction, goals which are working on what I have an increasing it. Goals that make me feel better and happier now, and better an happier the longer I go on.

So I've been going to the gym and doing circuit training. This has enabled me to walk with a straightened back, and to get up off of the couch without some great hoisting maneuver. I have engaged in an activity (instead of refraining from an activity) and have (re)gained an ability. My energy level has increased, as has my flexibility. I am happier, because happiness takes energy. In addition to that, instead of hating where I am right now and thinking about how much less I'll hate myself in ten pounds, I am loving where I am and what I've accomplished, and this excites me and spurs me forward.

These kinds of goals are far more "effort in=results out" than negative goals. Don't get me wrong, all of my positive goals aren't fitness related. I love the fact that the more I play the piano, the better I get. I like studying French, and trying to place all of the world's countries on the globe.

But the fitness ones are pretty good right now, and they are helping me to do the rest. It's much easier to play the piano when you're not exhausted by 5:30 pm.

And the more I focus on these positive goals, the less hung up I am about the "negative" things--how many pounds haven't shifted off of the scale when I wanted them to (and did everything right, darn it!), how many times I fail to live up to my own expectations, etc.

So I've decided that I am going to "learn" to jog. Hence, the heart rate monitor.

I remember joining the cross-country team waaaay back in Junior High, so I feel relatively certain that at some point in my life I did, in fact, jog. I remember doing some kind of jogging-in-place activity in High School when I was trying to take off a few pounds, but these are literally my only recollections of actual jogging, other than a vague impression of trying to catch a train at some point.

Currently, jogging fits under the "things I cannot do" heading. It's actually sort of strange--I noticed that when I injured my back and had the subsequent nerve damage, my reflexes sort of stopped working. When I'd be crossing a street and a car would suddenly zip around a corner, I could feel the reflex happening in my brain, but the "lower body tensing up for flight" part no longer happened. It was a very odd feeling.

But I noticed the other day that I was able to move more quickly when doing something, so I decided to try an experiment on the treadmill and discovered to my absolute shock that I was able to ACTUALLY JOG for somewhere between 20-30 seconds. This is brand new--as in, the last couple of weeks. I cannot think about it without picturing myself standing, frozen, in the middle of that street, watching the car coming and knowing that I was not capable of moving out of the way. My inability to jog was twofold--not only would my legs just plain not move, but if I attempted any kind of exertion at all after a while, my heart rate would skyrocket.

I was so excited! My legs moved! My heart rate went pretty high right away, but I actually saw my feet moving fast! I immediately decided that jogging would be a great new positive goal.

However, I'm going to have to be really careful heart rate-wise, and the monitor built into the treadmill is amazingly rubbish, so I purchased one of those spiffy chest-strap-and-wrist-band models.

It somehow amuses me that jogging, which I have always classified as a form of torture, now seems like a really exciting thing to work toward, simply because it seemed impossible after an injury. But be that as it may, I've been having SUCH A GOOD TIME.

This heart rate monitor is fabulous. (In case you're interested, it's the Polar F6 model.) Since it's a chest-strapped thingy, it's not bothered by your feet hitting the pavement or whatever. It has this program on it that works out your specific maximum heart rate for you, so you don't have to rely on "220-age" estimates. It makes a little beeping noise if your heart rate goes too high or too low. It keeps a diary for you, has a web tool that you can upload all of your workout info to, and recommends/helps you create weekly programs.

I love this new toy.

I think it appeals to the geek in me. I love the fact that I can do a workout and then view graphs and see how many minutes I stayed within which "zone," and chart progress and see how much longer I can go at "jogging" speed before I have to slow down (and gasp, dying). I suppose that lots of people are content to run around the block one week and try to do it twice the next, but I am far happier if I can come home and look at a line graph when I'm done.

I love the fact that fitness has gone high-tech enough to be geeky.

So basically, I'm doing the traditional "learn to jog" program. I do a little warmup, and then jog until the heart rate monitor beeps, then slow down to a walk and recover for a while, and repeat this over and over until the end of my workout. Eventually, I should be able to jog for A WHOLE MINUTE at a time.

However, a large part of my brain still wants to say, "But why would you want to?"