Note To Self

Self,

Crap food gives you migraines. Stop eating it. Otherwise you wind up looking like a lame-o when you crawl out of the pool after only 25 minutes of swimming because you feel like you're going to throw up.

Me

Let's Try This Again

I'm going to do a challenge. For real. Since I've recorded several successfully-completed challenges on here before, we all know I can do them. For a myriad of reasons, this one just won't stick.

Until now.

(Is that ominous enough?)

For the next 8 weeks (through week ending December 17) I will swim 3 times and take 1 strength training class per week. After that come the holidays and while I fully intend to get in some workouts, I probably won't meet any challenge goals for a couple of weeks there at the end of December.

I'm also going to take the suggestion of one of my SparkPeople swimming buddies and reward myself with one dollar per mile of swimming. My reward will be a swimp3. I've read rave reviews about them and actually ran into a girl at the Y who was using one and took the opportunity to pick her brain about it. She LOVES it.

So this morning, I swam. That's part 1 of the challenge.

I swam 1.21 miles. That's $1.21 into the Swimp3 Fund!

Oh, Hai

I'm sitting at home feeling sorry for myself so, hey, why not update the blog?

I'm missing all the fun today because I'm sick. Seriously, my body picks the most inopportune times to quit on me. Today is the 250th anniversary of the church in Cambridge where Jason and I sing (and where we got married). There was a big celebratory choral service this morning, which I had already figured I couldn't sing at since I haven't had a voice since early Friday morning, but which I planned to attend. Only I woke up at 7 AM, got out of bed, went to bathroom, and came right back to bed. I was coughing, stuffy, head-achey, with a bonus of a stomach ache that made me feel really crappy if I stood up for more than a couple minutes.

Also, Jason's brother had a conference in Boston this past week and he came down to Providence to spend the weekend with us. He also used to sing at Christ Church, so he and Jason are both up there, with plans to get together with some of our Boston friends this afternoon.

Boo! As I just posted to a friend on Facebook, my body couldn't have given out NEXT week? There's no 250th anniversary celebration and brother-in-law in town NEXT week.

I did manage to pull it together enough to go on a long drive with Jason and his brother down to the shore yesterday, and we made a nerdy pilgrimage to Quonochontaug, Rhode Island, where Fox Mulder's family on X-Files apparently had a vacation home.

(Nerd sidenote: Now that I live in New England, I realize how patently absurd it was that Mulder's family lived on Martha's Vineyard (which is an island, known for having vacation homes) and had a vacation home in Quonochontaug (an obscure community in Rhode Island). Also, it took Mulder 3 or 4 hours to drive from DC to Martha's Vineyard, which is about 500 miles away and, again, an island.)

Quonochontaug was actually amazingly beautiful. So beautiful that Jason started mulling over ways to do his lab work from home if we bought the amazing 4.25 million dollar home on the beach that we saw for sale because it's way too far away to commute to Providence every day. And, you know, a house like that is totally within our price range.

Last night we went to the Jack-O-Lantern Spectacular at the zoo, which truly is spectacular. This is our 3rd year and I'm continually wowed by the details of the pumpkins.

The fun part for me was that in between the drive and the pumpkins, my sinus headache morphed into a raging migraine and I had to take a migraine pill and lay down for a couple hours. Lame. I swear, Jason's family really and truly must think I'm some delicate consumptive Victorian woman by now because I always seem to get sick when we're with them.

If you've managed to read this far, this post actually does have a tie in with the whole health and wellness point of this blog. First of all, I have not been eating well, I have not been working out and I have not been taking good care of myself for the past few weeks. I haven't been sick since I got the flu in the Spring (March, maybe?). I started swimming with the Masters group in April or May and since then have been pretty diligent with staying active and eating well.

Also, I've realized that I don't get migraines when I keep my carbs low.

But as soon as I slip up, I become susceptible and here I sit, pitifully coughing and sniffling and just feeling all around yucky. Also, over the last 2 weeks, I've been popping migraine pills like candy. This is after I managed to store up a fairly good supply because I kept filling the prescriptions, but not needing the pills. I took my last one this morning. Because this morning I felt another migraine coming on.

I feel extremely fortunate that I've found a medication that actually helps my migraines, since I know a lot of people either need a much higher dose, or don't get any relief from pills, but I would much, much rather not take them at all.

Despite my good intentions of starting a new challenge, I didn't follow through this time. In the past few weeks, I went out of town twice - once for business, once for pleasure. When I was home, I needed to catch up on work, so I got out of bed early, not to go to the gym, but to get to work. And I stayed at work late to finish. Wednesday I had a slight sore throat, Thursday it was getting worse, on Friday I answered the phone and my boss said, "You sound like s**t."

Work has been busy all summer and I managed not to get sick. I'm convinced it's because I was taking good care of my body outside of work. OK, so I wasn't losing weight, but I was healthy!

As soon as this cold thing is over, I am back to the gym. I'm going to restart my challenge again and this time I will do it! I'll keep you all posted.