Starling Fitness: Daily writings on Fitness, Diet, and Health

I told you about Lisa some time ago when she was training for her Century Ride:

• Starling Fitness » Training for The Century Ride

Well, she finished it and here are her thoughts about it:

• Learning The Lessons of Nixon » 100k!

She did pretty well until the last five miles:

“I was fine up to the 50 mi rest stop, but the last 5 miles were very, very painful — I felt like my legs were on fire from just above the knees to just below the hips from all the lactic acid built up in my muscles; my hands had started to go numb, and my neck and shoulders hurt. I ticked off every little bit of a mile during that last stretch. It came on very suddenly — maybe I was bonking (experiencing muscle failure due to depleting glycogen, a condition that happens when you’ve used up all your body’s available quick energy stores).”

We’ll talk more about bonking tomorrow.

Congratulations, Lisa!

Tish is toying with the idea of dieting again.

• love and hope and sex and dreams: Diet Culture

She’s in that uncomfortable spot of not liking her body the way it is, but not really wanting to jump into dieting again.

“Take me as I am–chubby and all.”

“But that’s not the point. There are times when I’m uncomfortable. And I don’t like my underwear size.”

“So, I’m toying with the diet thing again–wondering if I can do it, even for a couple of months, to lose a couple of pounds.”

If you are feeling like you want to be thinner, but don’t want to diet, I have two words for you, “Don’t Diet.” Seriously, dieting will only make you feel deprived.

What to do about the body image issues?

My answer has always been to start with exercise. I allow myself to eat whatever I want, but I insist that I exercise regularly. Once I work up to six sessions a week, it seems more natural to eat healthier. It’s almost as if the exercise makes my body crave healthier food.

I never really lose any weight when I’m eating whatever I want and exercising, but it leads me to the place where I can actually consider eating healthy again.

52 Projects is a craft site with projects to do each week, but this week, in addition to the project, we got a lovely story about running on a path in a park.

• 52 Projects: Tree

The author had run past that tree for years and has a craft project to prove it. Running has been very helpful:

“Running is a way to keep the pounds off my mid-riff, to keep me from screaming because the TV volume is up too loud or some other stupid thing that I shouldn’t be losing my temper over, to keep my blood pressure down, to do some thinking or to do no thinking at all, to help clear my mind, to be alone, to move forward, faster and faster and faster. And throughout and within all of the running, that tree was my fixture: to reach the tree, to see the tree, to think back on it as I walked into my apartment, winded, soar and soaked in sweat, but smiling down to my core.”

If you run a similar route every day, pick a tree on the route that is YOUR tree, just like this person did. Hopefully, yours won’t suffer the same indignity that this tree did.