Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Tips for Feeling Better in the Morning?

6:00am: It seems to get harder by the day to wake up. I don't know if it's the novelty of this whole morning dog walk thing that's wearing off or I'm just not getting enough sleep. After getting up and moving around, I feel great. My energy generally lasts until about 9:30pm or 10pm. It's just those initial 10 minutes when I wake up in the morning. My eyes are heavy. My legs are heavy. My lungs are heavy. I think that it's pretty common though for us CFers to feel our worst in the morning. And it may be the common thing, but that doesn't mean that I have to like it. Does anybody out there have any tricks or tips to offer that makes them feel better when they first wake up? If so, I'm all ears.

After shaking off the cobwebs and spitting up some dark thick green mucus into the bathroom sink, I was ready to roll. J Bell was excited as usual, but was off a little bit this morning as well. Before we walk, I always tell her to bring me her leash. She'll run off, grab it, and then hand it to me. Well, today, she kept on running right buy her leash as if she had gone blind during the course of the night. It was really weird. She seemed extremely confused. I finally had to point right at it before she got it. Maybe we're both sleep walking during the night and don't even know it....

I coughed quite a bit during the beginning of the walk and was moving up a decent amount of light yellow or clear mucus. I was able to eat early last night, so this morning I was free of the "I'm about to lose my lunch (or dinner) feeling". The pace was slower today than normal, but I think that can be explained. One: the obvious is that I was walking a bit slower than normal. Two: Jezzabel peed at least 7 times and pooped 3. Three: We ran into two other dogs and two big trucks (garbage and construction) and a school bus. J Bell hates big vehicles. Not SUV big, but garbage truck big. I think it's the size and the crazy noises that come out of them. When she sees one she tries to turn around and run the other way. When I make her face her fear and walk by them, she'll crouch down real low and then start to sprint when she passes them up. She looks real funny during the whole process, I should film it one of these days.

So all of that added up to a slower time than normal. I need to concentrate though on picking up the pace a little in the morning to make my lungs work a little harder. I may also drive a new route today to get a change of scenery.

Total Distance: 2.1 miles Time: 39'02"

6:30pm: After Mandi got a "quick" 3 mile run in (again, I hate her), we headed off to the gym. We decided to switch things up a bit a run to the gym for our run/walk for the night. The gym is roughly .25 miles from my house. It was a very windy day, which made it incredibly tough, but I managed to run almost the whole way. We got caught up by a traffic light and decided to walk from that point to the gym.

At the gym we did arms. Everything felt good and I was able to increase the weight or reps on almost every lift. We concentrated on picking up the tempo while we were lifting and not taking long breaks in between lifts. We also wanted to hurry up and get back to watch the Idols results show. I did a max lift on both my triceps and biceps which felt really good and actually surprised me a bit. I need to start really challenging my muscles and focus on increasing my weight more rapidly.

We ended up doing 15 second sprints on the way back from the gym. This really got my lungs going. We would sprint for 15 seconds and then rest for 30, and so on. I started coughing like crazy before the last sprint and definitely got some stuff up that was way down in there. I'm going to work sprints into my workout more regularly. They really paid off today, because overall, I really didn't feel that great. I was just kind of junky all day and felt pretty tight all over. When I'm not feeling so hot, I think it's even more important to push myself harder. I just let my body know that feeling crappy is unacceptable. Today, my body listened.

Total Distance: .5 miles

Total Distance Run/Walk for Day: 2.6 miles