Little Speck on Big Planet

Newton’s first law of motion – A body in motion tends to stay in motion.

Unless that body lives in the DC suburbs and has had somewhere around 40 inches of snow dumped on it over the past 5 days. I now live in a world of “has been cancelled“.

My swim team practices have all been cancelled this week, along with all my yoga classes. Plus, being the outside runner that I am, there is no place to run with the snow all over the roads, and forget about trying to find a sidewalk.

So what is fitness junkie to do?

Now before you say shovel, trust me, there has been plenty of that. But shoveling has not been providing the elevated heart rate aerobic exercise I am looking for. I need something else.

Enter this great show I found on TV, Total Body Sculpt with Gilad. These videos are great! Gilad is upbeat, knowledgeable and very good at encouraging you to keep going. Plus, all the ones I’ve seen have been filmed in Hawaii, which is a nice change from the 5 foot piles of snow that now surround my house. I added some 2 pound hand-weights to increase the intensity of the workout and it has worked like a charm. Hip, hip, hooray for elevated heart rate!

These videos are for any fitness level as it allows you to work at whatever pace and intensity feels good to you. The only bad thing about doing these videos on TV are the breaks in the action for commercials. I tried to be disciplined and keep moving during the breaks, though without Gilad there, it was easy to wuss out.

So in my snow bound state I went looking to see if I could find these videos for sale anywhere. Eureka, he has several on Amazon! I will be getting a few of these as I now see the benefit of having access to fitness tools in the home.

I love to dance! There is something so freeing to just let music come into your body and to allow it to take you across a dance surface. From the age of 3-14 I was regularly enrolled in ballet classes. I loved them, I wasn’t very good at ballet, but it didn’t matter because I had fun. When I got to college I took classes with friends in salsa and swing dance. Then came a time in my life when I had no dancing outlet. I married a man who is wonderful in so many ways but he does possess two left feet and the inability to boogie down. Sigh, what is a girl to do?

Enter Diva Fit into my life.

What is Diva Fit you ask… it is a pole dancing studio. That’s right folks, I said pole dancing.

Now, before you screw up your nose with any preconceived notions you have let me tell you a little about it. This is not a seedy bar with drunken men throwing dollar bills. It is a woman owned, women only dance fitness studio. At each class we have an instructor who guides us through a workout that includes dancing, leg work, ab work, and arm work. It is so much fun and by far, the most physically demanding fitness activity I participate in.

I have been taking classes at Diva Fit for almost two years now and it is a blast. Pole dancing to me is about being strong, beautiful, and comfortable in your own body. As women, we tend to be excessively hard on ourselves about our bodies. It is important to love your self no matter what shape or size it is.

Fitness pole dancing studios are a growing trend. Though not everyone may be able to find something like this where you live, if you can, I highly encourage you give it a try. If you feel nervous, go with a friend, that way you have someone to enjoy and talk about your experience with.

Inverted Handstand

Don’t worry, you won’t be doing anything like that for awhile.

“I’m going to run a 5K”. I can clearly remember the moment when I made that statement in March of 2006. There was no particular reason why I wanted to do this other than to say that I ran a 5k. The last time I had done any sort of running was in college when I thought it would be a good idea and then promptly gave up when I got tired.

My husband had been training for a race at the time and was doing a great job. His two pieces of advice were to go to a running store and get fitted for a proper pair of shoes and to pick a training plan that I would stick with. The first part was easy, I visited Potomac River Running, had them watch me run a on a treadmill, and got fitted in a great pair of shoes. The second part started easy and then deteriorated. First I got bored, then I started not doing all the training runs I was supposed to.  The nail in the coffin was that I got hung up on my time.

I became so fixated on running the whole race in a certain time that I completely overlooked the importance of training for the race. So what happened? Two weeks before my race I hurt myself, I tweaked my left iliotibial band (which runs on the outside of the leg between the knee and the hip). Through massage and other therapeutic means, I did manage to still do the race, but I was in pain and I felt horrible afterwards.

So I quit running again, for about a year and a half. Some time in 2008, I got the itch to try this whole running thing again. Maybe it was because I was older and wiser, or maybe it was because I was more in tune with my body from diving deep into my yoga practice, but I felt this was my time to try the 5k again.

I laced up the shoes to start training. No longer was I concerned about time, my mantra became, “I want to finish and not end up in the medical tent”. I started a run/walk program and I stuck to it. Very slowly I added more running in-between my 2 minute walk breaks. I successfully completed several other races, always employing my run/walk strategy. And I had a great time while doing this.

You may be wondering if this story has a point, and yes it does. This past Sunday, I had several friends that asked if I wanted to do a 5k with them. I said yes and signed up. It was a little chilly race day morning but the sun was out and there was a great crowd there. The race started and I took off at a nice comfortable pace for me, the course varied between flat and some small rolling hills. I felt great throughout the whole race. At about the 2.5 mile mark (the total distance of a 5k is 3.1 miles) I realized that I had not taken a walk break, but that I also didn’t need to.

I finished the whole 5k without stopping to walk. That was not my goal or intention when I started the race, it just kind of happened. I DID IT! It only took me 3 years and 7 months, but I did it.

So the moral of the story is… Be determined in your mind and patient in your body, it will be amazing what you can conquer.

Maybe this story will inspire a wannabe runner out there who thinks they can’t do it.