Exercise at my own pace and level and cheer others on!

Came home in a terrible horrible no good very bad mood. Gentleman friend informed me that if I was going to be cranky anyway, I was at least going to be cranky And Do Stuff, so we went out to run to the park.

“Will it make me feel better?” I asked before we started.
“Definitely.”

Halfway through the run, I told him I wasn’t so sure it was making me feel better. Gentleman friend told me to stop being an asshole, and that he wasn’t my bacon. (When I’m blue I tell bacon my troubles)

We walked the whole way back.

Sunday evening run to the park with the boy. Arrived just in time to hear the first song of a band that was playing—took some fun pictures of the hoola hoop girls, but I was all self-conscious about being sweaty and gross in the crowd of people enjoying the show.

Also ran part of the way back: the uphill part! Soon, we will be running the whole thing, I think.

Took a few days off, (well, two weeks, really) but jumped back in with gusto when I joined my office in the 5k Chase Corporate Challenge (Picture is from the website, not of my taking).

Did the whole run in exactly 42 minutes. It was the third mile that killed me, I know I was under 10 minutes each for the first two, which means that last half was much slower, to have ended up with a 12 minute mile average overall.

But… I made it. And I hadn’t done that since the last Chase run our office participated in, which was 2 years ago. And while I have more aches and pains than I did then, I am actively taking better care of my health. So it’s a toss up over which was better, but, for the moment, I’m happy that I made it at all.

At 7:30am on a holiday morning, the bridge to the park is totally empty. The park itself is closed, the piers blocked off. A runner in red hops the railings and runs to the end of each of the piers and back, not to be interrupted from her routine. Later we run into her on the bridge as well.

Balloons from yesterday’s barbecue, they were setting it up as we were walking home from Sunday’s run. I learned the phrase “Que siente mejor.” Today, the balloons looked like they might hope to feel better themselves.

Also: sidewalk chalk and duck graffiti. An inability to decide on photographs after the fact. We ran the first 4 blocks back, for slightly over our 1.2 mile distance, but stopped when we got back to the bridge, because we knew we had a long day of walking ahead of us still.

Discouraging. Same 1.2 miles to the park, but not feeling very well today, thought I was up for the run, but arrived breathless and feeling quite miserable about the whole thing.

“Let’s take the bus back,” I suggested.

“Let us stroll at a reasonable pace” Gentleman Friend said, refusing to budge an inch from our routine.

On the way out, a man walking in the opposite direction had said “bless you” to us for running in the noonday sun. Returning, we discussed logistics of getting an earlier start to the morning, to save on dangers of sweat and heatstroke.

“I am sick of taking pictures of roses,” I muttered, pausing to catch a few more white ones in close up.

“There are an awful lot of them about… Do you think you can get them and the skyline in the same shot?”

“I can try.”

Thought to get out for a run, but never quite worked out the timing for an opportunity that wasn’t too close to a meal, or too long since coffee… some days are like that. The weather was beautiful, however, so a 2 mile walk around greenpoint instead, exploring some of the streets I hadn’t spent much time on, spending lots of time in Junk searching for items in the scavenger hunt, and then finding a strange floating glove in Newton Creek that quickly was carried out of sight again. NWP said it gave him the creeps, but I could not stop taking pictures, and even took a few seconds of video as well.

Decided to walk home from midtown, a 5.5 mile distance. Felt like it shouldn’t have taken us as long as it did, but we were tourists, stopping to admire the sights along the 59th street bridge, getting a bit lost and turned around on our way back to brooklyn through queens. The bridge does not let you off until one is quite a ways into queens, whereas it would have been most direct and convenient for us if we could have just hugged the shoreline.

Down to the park again, 1.2 miles. I set the pace at first, and then was teasing NWP about having him lead, as I was in better shape. He responded that his legs were longer, and that anything I could do, he could keep up with. So we booked it on the downhill section of the bridge, and raced each other the last block and a half to the park. I think I won. I think he might have let me.

Movie’s still going. We’re still running.

NWP and I ran 1.2 miles down to the park in LIC, which did involve the long hill up and over the pulaski bridge. It doesn’t seem like much of a run to me, but it was funny because I was totally outpacing him in the last couple of blocks. Turns out I am in better shape then I thought!

Because I am trying to use this goal as a reminder to myself of what I like about exercise and working out, I shall try to include little anicdotes about the experience, so that I have something to look back on during days when I’m questioning whether I really want to go out and do things.

Sunday was slightly overcast and very windy. When we got to the park, the wind over the salt water made me cry like I had been punched in the face… I couldn’t even look out over the water from the end of the pier. The benches there are rippled, and I ran along the top… if I had had wings, I could have been a crying sea fairy dancing flirting with wooden waves. Afterwards, there was a brilliant pink rose I wanted to take a photo of, but the wind kept blowing it out of view.

^{Edit: Pink rose photo added.}

Probably a useful thing, if I actually want everyone to know how to be encouraging and cheer me on in such a way that gets me up and moving.

The problem is that my desires for this goal are somewhat tricky because I am also working on my chronic pain goal. I could, if I wanted, make all of these strict fitness goals for myself, and push myself to work through them for the sake of it. But to do so would be not listening to my body in a way that was useful to trying to figure out why it hurts so much all the time… if I just push it until it hurts because of athletic reasons, I lose all sight of what is causing pain “just because”.

On the other hand, the fitness itself doesn’t seem to make what already hurts worse, and a moderate level of exercise will probably help to keep my muscles in good shape, and my body limber and stretched out. So it’s not wise to sit around and do nothing, hoping that some new test will figure out the root cause of my UPS (Unidentified Painful Stuff).

So my goals end up being this weird ambiguous “keep moving, with a focus on stretching and low impact exercises, and pay attention to slow down and be kind to my body when it is feeling strained”. We’ll see how it goes. I’m worried that without definite specific measurable achievable… (SMART) goals, I just won’t do it at all. But maybe if I just make a point of talking about when I do work out, it will remind me how much I like to be active, and I will be inspired to do more of it.

And I think that’s my request to everyone else… just keep reminding me that I need to do this because I like it, and that I deserve to be making time for fun things like working out. Because sometimes I forget, in the daily grind of “have to do”.