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I promised myself that I would accomplish what I have set out to do and that includes walking every single morning. No matter what. I finally got off the couch and stood up. Wow, my legs felt like they were still asleep. I was not looking forward to this uphill battle that I had ahead of me. My lungs felt decent for the morning and I did my normal cough up a huge mucus ball routine. When we hit the road I must say that I got into a good rhythm rather quickly. My lungs opened up and my legs felt a sudden rush of energy. Sometimes when a task ahead seem impossible, you just need to pull up your boot straps (or shoe laces) and just go for it. That's what I did this morning and it felt great. Not only did the walk itself feel awesome but it was satisfying to know that I was able to push through all of the mental garbage that was going through my head.
We ended up walking at a faster pace than yesterday. My legs felt very very strong throughout the whole walk. On the way back I was worried about the uphill climb back (because of yesterday), but we were able to keep to the same speed. Towards the end of the long hill I started to really move up a lot of junk. Almost all of it was clear with the exception of a few yellow streaks here and there. What I think I love most about walking so early in the morning is bringing up all of the crap that was just sitting there idle in my lungs during the night. The coughing combined with my treatments when I get back is a real winning combination I think. I really hope that these walks become increasingly easier so I can push up the pace and mileage even more. I just have to keep on reminding myself that it is one step at a time.
Total Distance: 2.7 miles
Side Note: If you're like me and you are cutting down on your portion size but increasing the frequency of your meals, do your best to stick with it. Yesterday I was on the fly so I had a pretty sizable gap in which I didn't eat. When dinner finally came around I was starving. I absolutely inhaled a chicken burrito, rice and refried beans. When the meal was done, I looked pregnant. My stomach was so bloated and uncomfortable that I asked myself for the rest of the night "Why did you do that dummy?". And then came this morning, the first half of the walk was all about trying to keep down last night's dinner. I'm very lucky (and so are other pedestrians) that the combo #12 wasn't all over the sidewalk.
1:00pm: I headed to the gym today to work out my chest and back. I was able to increase the weight or the reps on every lift that I did. It's still tough lifting my chest because of my shoulders, but I'm trying to keep the weight low to strengthen all of the tendons and ligaments in my shoulders. I've fallen a long way from my peak as far as lifting goes, and I'll probably never get back there, but I've shifted my goals as well. I'm really trying to work on my deep breathing while I lift and of course I'm trying to reshape my body as well. I'm getting up there in age and my belly seems to get bigger and bigger every year. I'm trying to take that weight from my buddha belly and shift it to my arms, chest, back, and shoulders. After a week of working out I have seen some improvement but I got a loooooooooong way to go.
Just for Mandi I decided to work out my abs again. She absolutely destroyed them two days ago to the point that it hurt when I coughed, yawned, laughed, or sneezed. I knew that they were due today though so I went ahead and did them. Every single crunch hurt. It felt like my abs were torn. I'm not kidding, every one of the 200 crunches felt like I was getting shanked in the gut by a dull knife. I barely was able to do 5 good ones in a row, so I had to take a lot of breaks. The last 50 did feel the best, so I'm thinking that my brain kicked in some medicine at the end. Thank goodness I'm done...now I can wipe up my tears and head for the locker room. Current Weight: 192 lbs. (dang you chicken burrito)
Side Note: While leaving the locker room, I heard a guy singing the theme song from the MTV show The Hills in a super high pitched tone. He was at least 38 years of age. I know what you're thinking, "How in the world do you know what the theme song to The Hills is?". I'm now wondering that too. Somebody please pull my man card.
6:30pm: Mandi was nice enough to escort me on my 3 mile run/walk AFTER she did her own 7 mile run. You could tell that her legs were tight and it wasn't the most enjoyable thing in the world. She is such a trooper. At the beginning of the walk my lungs felt pretty tight and I felt a piece of mucus that was stuck near the top of my airway. I coughed and coughed and nothing came out. Well, I shouldn't say that nothing came out. Plenty came out, just not the glob that I felt. My brother was also with us and he commented, "Man, you really could follow a trail of mucus home!".
We did short runs in between longer walks. Remember, when I say short, I mean it. We're talking 30 to 40 yards. Everything was starting to feel pretty good with about a mile to go and Mandi decided to challenge me. She picked a spot far off in the distance to run to. We started out and I was on fire, no problem I thought. About half way through, my breathing started to labor a little bit. About 3/4 of the way through I thought that I may pass out from lack of oxygen. I was REALLY hurting. It felt like I could only get in about a half of a breath at a time. I was pulling for air like crazy. When we stopped I was wobbling and I had a sharp pain in my chest. I think I may have blacked out for a millisecond there. On the bright side though, I finally coughed up that plug in my upper airway. That was quite a stretch, my legs were fine but my lungs were really struggling. My pulse shot up to 160bpm. That had to be a mile right?
Mandi estimates that we ran about 1/10th of a mile straight...maybe I bit off more than I could chew.
Total Distance: 3.0 miles
Total Distance Run/Walk for Day: 5.7 miles
