Getting started...

It's about time I start recording my thoughts, progress, and goals in an official blog! I have tons of notebooks and scraps of paper with this information so I'm going to try to transition myself to recording in this blog. I know there are friends and family curious to know what's happening and how I "get 'er done!" every day.

Let me discuss what's happening now. I'm in my "off season", build phase right now trying to put on some muscle in my upper body (deltoids, lats, and biceps) and my glutes. Since I'm heavier than I like to be (more lean body mass and a healthy layer of adipose! LOL), I'm taking it easy on my joints with low impact cardio. I do high intensity interval training 5-6 days a week, followed by a little medium intensity afterwards. I'm doing weight training about 5 days a week too. Most of my training is done early in the morning around 5 or 6 a.m. so I can be home for the the family when they wake up. Thankfully, I am a morning person so this works for me!!

My nutrition is back to about a 40/30/30 split with my caloric intake at 1800-2000 per day. As Michelle would say...I am following a "perfect plan, imperfectly", eating frequently, and giving myself more cheat meals than I would get during my lean down phase. I'm trying to stay away from sweets (my weakness!!) and keep only foods in the cupboard that I intend to eat. Sorry kids, that means you have to be healthy most of the time, too! If you are reading this and also have a hard time resisting cravings or junk food, my best advice is to GET RID OF IT and DON'T BUY IT. If it's not in the pantry and you don't buy it, you can't eat it. There's plenty of opportunities at restaurants, friends' houses, the office, etc. to eat junk food and cheat sometimes.

Today I wrote to a coach to help me with my swimming and biking. With all this training, I figured I'd improve in a few areas and...what the heck...do a triathlon in 2009. Right now, my goal is very broad: I will complete a sprint triathlon in April or May 2009. Since I have no idea what I am doing, I thought that would be a pretty good start. Who knows where it will go? I'll evaluate myself and my feelings about it after I complete it or once I start training. It was about this time last year that I started thinking about competing in Figure. My goal was defined on about January 28th and was pretty broad at that time: I will compete in the Emerald Cup in April 2008 in the best shape of my life. Yep, that's pretty broad. I ended up competing in 4 shows and really defining my goals as my knowledge increased. Many thanks to Michelle Anderson for creating plans that worked for me!!!! After my recovery period (June), I decided it was time to utilize Michelle's plans from start to finish, compete in the fall in Open and win my class. I really wanted to win the Overall, but as a newbie to the sport, I wasn't sure I could do it. Thank you again Michelle for believing in me and helping me accomplish this goal - not once, but twice!!! Not only am I ridiculously happy about these wins, I am thrilled that I was able to do it without any injuries or health issues. I'm not going to say it was easy - those of you who saw me crying and totally depleted know that it took everything I had - but I know that I didn't hurt my body, and that is really important to me.

I often get raised eyebrows and questions about how healthy this sport is and if leaning down to such extremes is unhealthy. Most people don't believe me when I say that I do it in the healthiest way possible and feel better than I ever have in my life. So, to show the scientific results to what I put my body through and prove to everyone how healthy or unhealthy this process is, I am going to get a whole bunch of tests done in January and in April right before I compete. I'm also going to try to document my progress weekly and maybe even post it here....time permitting.

Time to get back to work and tackle my day! Here is my quote for the week...found in a work out book that I kept almost 15 years ago:

"Everything that you do to improve your physical well-being will have a positive impact on how good you feel about yourself." - Brian Tracy