→ Tuesday’s Weigh-in: 193.6 ←

Yes, you read that right. I gained almost a pound this week. Mostly it’s because of my cycle, but I suppose part of it could be the 1200 calories in mini-cupcakes I ate on Thursday. Although I’m blaming them on my cycle, too, so it all comes back to that. I’m glad I ate them, though. No, not just because they tasted really good. Also because they made me sick to my stomach for almost two full days. I think that was a good lesson for me: too much sugar = unhappy tummy. We’ll see if it sticks.

Movin’ on, nothing to see here…

So, I signed up for my first 5k. It’ll be on June 26th. A mom friend suggested it when her son said that maybe BeBop would run in the kid’s race with him. How cute is that? Anybody in the near vicinity who would like to run with us, let me know and I’ll send you the info.

I ran for 52 minutes yesterday. Went 4 1/4 miles and then we took the boys to the zoo in the rain because it was BeBop’s fourth birthday. So I got 10,000 steps outside of the workout. I also ate my way through an entire bag of freeze-dried mangos yesterday, but I don’t really want to talk about that.

I want to talk about recovery time. My trainer says that a good way to measure your cardiovascular health is to see how fast your heart rate recovers from exertion. Basically you get your heart rate elevated through aerobic exercise and then you slow down and see how many beats per minute your heart rate goes down in one minute. So, say you’re walking at 3.5 MPH with your heart rate at 140, then you slow down to     2.0 MPH and your heart rate goes down to 120 after a minute. You’ve just recovered 20 beats in that minute, which my trainer says means you are in adequate cardiovascular health. Good for you, my imaginary friend.

Now, my trainer was telling me this on a day when I did not feel like working out. In fact, I was complaining about it rather loudly. I was so focused on how much I didn’t want to work out, that I didn’t even realize what he was up to until we were in the middle of measuring my recovery time. The scientist in me simply could not resist experimenting to see if my recovery would change depending on how high my heart rate was when I started  slowing down. My trainer, he totally has my number. I’m not so sure that’s a good thing.

Anyhoo, guess what. My recovery was the same when I started out at 150 as it was when I started at 170. And it took a couple of minutes running at 6 MPH to get it up to 170, which shows how far I’ve come. Unfortunately, my trainer also said it shows that he can push me a little harder, but I’ll worry about that next week. The great news is that I recovered about 40 beats per minute, meaning I’m in pretty damn good cardiovascular shape. It also means I think I’m ready to run the 5k in a few weeks. Go me!