Free Your Inner Animal!

Here's a great post with a video that Julie from Chubby Mommy Running Club put together of yesterday's training session, where I took her through an "Animal Day" workout designed to strengthen her core and supporting muscles (no, running is not just about the legs, at least not when you train with me!). We did salamander pushups, bear walk, crab walk, spider crosses, and wall balls. And we ran. In the pouring rain. It's a funny video, and shows most of the stuff we did, so if you're interested in creating a great core body workout without a lot of equipment, give it a watch!

Several of these exercises came from Darryl Edwards' excellent blog The Fitness Explorer. In his FAQ section, he has lots of great little how-to videos for natural movement and bodyweight exercises.

Watching Julie's video, I only have a few thoughts:

1. I should never try to talk on camera after exercising. Sheesh, I meant crabs have EXOskeletons, not ENDO skeletons.We have endoskeletons, and they're quite useful little things, but you do have to surround them with muscles in order for them to work right.

2. I should remember that Julie ALWAYS brings her little Flip camera and I should dress appropriately. Big baggy white karate pants = not very flattering on film. I had just finished my morning karate workout and was already tapped out by the time she got there. Sweaty, sticky, hair all over the place. Yikes! Where's my hair and makeup people???

3. I'm glad that Julie is open to my unorthodox training methods. She's training for a half marathon and I only have her running three days a week. Each running day is a quality workout (track work, tempo, endurance), and is supplemented by three days of cross training and core strengthening. With anyone I train, my goal is for them to be a strong, well-rounded athlete, not just limp across the finish line of their chosen event.

1. Julie is a ton of fun to train with, you can see that by watching her on video. A good workout with someone fun can brighten your whole day!

I'm So Zen I Can't Stand It

Those of you who have met me would probably not utter the words "zen" and "Robin" in the same sentence. I don't inspire that kind of warm, fuzzy, calm feeling. More like "zanily energetic" on a good day, and "close to psychotic" on a bad one. My former boss once confided to me that when he called on one of my references, he was told "Robin is an unstoppable force of nature. She's okay as long as you don't get in the way." I'm still not really clear on whether that was a good reference or a bad one.

I blame it all on my mother. No really. When she was pregnant with me, her doctor (in all of his 1960s doctorly wisdom) didn't want her to gain too much weight. Like no more than 15 pounds. I myself gained approximately 280 pounds when I was pregnant. Well, maybe 60 or 70, but it felt like 280. So back to this doctor. He prescribed her some appetite control pills. Which we all know back in 1966 were probably something like, oh, amphetamines. Yep, I came out looking for that energetic high. I was just lucky to get hooked on exercise, not something worse.

By the way, I don't really blame my mom. She's awesome. Really. Our kids adore her, she does cool things like kayaks and hikes, and she wears hats like this that fold out and double as a fan (really!). I totally forgive her for listening to her idiot doctor back in 1966, and also for that time she made me go to the county fair with her when she was dressed in a chicken costume (yes, I've finally worked through that one in therapy), but really I had no chance of being normal. None whatsoever.

Which is all to say that I don't usually inspire feelings of zen in people. Except that this week, I'm just all over the zen thing. First of all, okay I do use the word zen when I talk about swimming a lot. Because in order to swim well, you have to "turn the eye inward" as they say in the zen business and really notice what you're doing. Lots of people just go swim laps, go back and forth and back and forth at the same speed with the same technique and never really get any better. In order to swim better, you have to start by paying attention. So when Julie used the word Zen when she blogged about our first swim coaching session, it didn't surprise me all that much. Fortunately, she's like a zen master already or something and was able to incorporate the whole gliding and stretching thing out and decreased her swim golf score by an astonishing amount just in one pool session.

Then, just while I was basking in the whole glow of someone actually grokking what I was trying to tell them in the pool and getting all zen with it, I get an email from a Buddhist magazine asking to use one of my photographs to accompany an article. It's always exciting to me when my photos get published, and I'm honored that they think it's worthy to go with such introspective thoughts.

That all collides nicely with this week, which has already become one of the shit-craziest scheduling nightmares in my parenting life so far, and has ominously shown itself to be the harbinger of things to come. My daughter is taking seven dance classes (no that's not a typo), plus theatre, choir, horseback riding, and French. My son is taking Spanish, training at the brown belt level in karate (lots of time at the dojo) and I'm coaching his robotics team. These activities are in all sorts of different places. Throw in my coaching gigs at three different pools, taking karate myself, and teaching kickboxing, and you've got twenty-five (I counted) different places I need to be each week. Those are just the scheduled things, that doesn't account for the playdates, field trips, and unscheduled appointments that might crop up. So needless to say, if I'm going to feel any measure of zen in the coming months, I'm going to need to create it myself. So now it's after midnight, I'm done blogging for now and I'm off to meditate my way to a state of inner peace. Namaste and goodnight.

Punching Things, With Julie

So Julie, from Chubby Mommy Running Club came over to my garage/gym yesterday for some coaching - ostensibly aiming to do a triathlon in the spring. But somehow one thing led to another and we ended up punching things (well, things like my punching bag at least) and maybe kicking a little bit too. The great thing about spontaneous fitness is you never know what you'll end up doing. A few laps around a track or a session with the boxing gloves. Having fun with exercise is the single most important thing in my book. If you can't have fun and play like a kid, why bother?

Well, let's just say that Julie knows how to play, and brings a lot of enthusiasm to the table. You can see our adventures and misadventures with our impromptu kickboxing lesson in this hysterical video on her blog.

Speaking of spontaneous fitness, this is a topic that's been on my mind a lot lately, what with the winding down of my triathlon season, thinking about what fun things I might do next year (a swim of Crater Lake with our Master's team might just be in the works, wheee!), and of what, really, I want out of my personal fitness goals. Are they serving me? Or am I serving them? What do I want to be able to really do with my body and why? How do other people approach their goals? What things work and don't in order for people to stay motivated? Stay tuned for more aimless ramblings on this subject at some unspecified time in the future.