Impossible is a typoRunning my pants off and loving myself along the way

Step 1 - Fat Girl's Guide to Feeling Like Crap and Avoiding Exercise

Fat Girl’s Guide to Feeling Like Crap and Avoiding Exercise.

The mission here, Folks, is to avoid exercise at all costs. We’re going to get crafty, subversive, sneaky and down right slippery. Your inner Fit Girl is a tough nut to crack. She LIKES working out – GASPS. I know, it’s hard to believe. I don’t know how anyone could enjoy working out. I mean seriously. You get all sweaty and smelly. You sweat. Ew gross! You get pimples on your nose. AND you have to wear work out clothes AND everyone will be looking at how big you butt is. This is unacceptable. Fit Girl doesn’t care about these things. She actually thinks its COOL when she gets soaked in sweat. Yuckie. So we’re going to have to employ some sneaky techniques to avoid exercise at all costs. And if we do this right and we’re really lucky, we’ll have endless bags of Cheese Doodles.

Step 1 – Fill you’re life with awesome exciting stuff.

This is the most crucial part. You have to get so busy with amazing stuff that you feel like you have no time to brush your teeth let alone take an hour to run or go to the yuckie gym. Keep saying YES to projects. Say YES to helping friends move or working on their websites. Say YES to extra work shifts. YES to everything and anything. You want to get your life scheduled down to the minute. It’s super important that you schedule phone calls first thing in the morning, and last thing at night. It’s ideal if you work with people in different time zones for maximum schedule SNAFUs. Oh and make sure you schedule only 20 minutes between appointments. Any thing more than that and Fit Girl might get in in a run.

Step 2 – Do not go to the grocery store.

Now that your life is full of awesome stuff, of course you won’t have time for the supermarket. For your inner Fit Girl, the supermarket is an adventure what with all the label reading and comparing light bread and whole wheat bread and normal good-ole-fashioned white bread. Seriously? How can you have a PB&J and whole wheat?? It’s like eating cardboard. Once you’re scheduled so tight, the only option is to use your gym time to go to the supermarket. “Oh, wait, instead of standing in line at the supermarket, we can just snack on hummus and chips at the handy convenience store. We’ll have time for salad tomorrow”. This is your mission – CONVINENCE. Taking an hour to cook and prep veggies is NOT convenient. Sure, if you invested an hour at the grocery store you’d be set for the week, but please refer back to Step 1. You’d rather be doing awesome stuff than shopping for carrots.

Step 3 – Tomorrow, Tomorrow

Embrace Tomorrow. Tomorrow you’ll have time to run. Tomorrow you’ll have time for the supermarket. Tomorrow you’ll have time to cook. Tomorrow you’ll eat healthy. Really get into Tomorrow Mode. Today you can have Cheese Doodles because TOMORROW you’ll be good.

Now, if you successfully implement Steps 1 through 3 for about a week straight, you’ll be low on sleep, you’ll have none of that endorphin nonsense from exercise and you’ll be well on your way to running your immune system into the ground thereby catching a cold. Then it’s Golden Time! When you have a cold, ice cream for breakfast is totally appropriate! Now go out there, Folks and do your best to avoid exercise!!

Whoa Nelli. I did not realize how hot it was until I was about half a mile into my run. The sun was piercing and it actually hurt. And of course you know I didn’t have on any sunscreen. I found myself from one pool of shade to another.

Two lessons to learn:

• Be aware of the weather and plan accordingly
• DRINK WATER STUPID

About 2 miles into my run, I look at my watch. Oh poo. I didn’t realize how late is was. I’m still thinking it’s 9am. I have to make lunch and do laundry before I head out to work this afternoon. I really have to do laundry. REALLY. I’m running in a t-shirt that’s an XXLarge and shorts that, well, let’s just say if I did some side lunges to stretch out my inner thighs, I’d be featured on TMZ next to Lindsay and Brittany. So I have no clean running clothes left, that’s what I’m saying. I may not even have clean work clothes. That’s problematic. I’m coming up to a point on my route where I can shortcut home, making my 3 mile run a 2.5 mile run. Should I head home, and do laundry? Is that being responsible or a wimp because it’s hot and I don’t want to run anymore?

I walk for a bit to take an inventory of what’s really going on. Am I using laundry as an excuse to go easy on my work out? Is this a tricky trick of Fat Girl to be lazy.

No. Here are the facts -

I’ve already run 15 miles this week. I’m biking to and from work today and tomorrow. It’s not like I’m sitting on my butt eating bon bons. 2.5 miles is a totally respectable distance to run.

So I headed home. Laundry Load One is in the works. Lunch will get made shortly and I still ran 2.67 miles in 33:30 at a pace of 12’30″ burning 381 calories.

So I forgot to have breakfast again. I don’t know what’s up with that. Going on like two weeks now, I’ve just totally fallen out of the breakfast habit. On days I’m not working, I get up, do email and twitter for a while, write a bit then decide it’s time for a run. Halfway into my run, I’ll realize that I skipped breakfast and I’m running out of gas. I come home and down a smoothie. Now it’s almost lunch time and my food gets all out of whack for the day.

I really need to work on getting a plan together and reclaim breakfast time!

Anyway, I did make it out for a run and my legs felt awful heavy again. Could be the no breakfast thing. Could be it’s hot. Could be that I just don’t know how to push myself to go harder. I’m just going to do my little three mile loop at whatever pace for a few more days and then try and push harder. Fat Girls is screaming of course that she can’t go any faster or harder. Ha! We’ll see who wins this battle!

Today I ran 3.5 miles in 42:22 at a pace of 12’09″ burning 497 calories.

Woke up WAY late today which means I’m in a schedule squeeze. So I have to sacrifice something. Running or Housework or Job Hunting or something else.

I tweeted: @FatGirlsCanRun I woke up late, my schedule is looming, my to-do list is long… can I really squeeze in a run???

And the responses came flying in:

@katdoesdiets @FatGirlsCanRun you’ll feel better?

@SkinnySushi @FatGirlsCanRun YES! You’ll feel better if you do

@fitblogr @FatGirlsCanRun My mantra the past few weeks has been “someone who is busier than you is running right now.” It always gets me out the door

@katdoesdiets @FatGirlsCanRun I struggle with those choices often!

@ashleyjane36 @FatGirlsCanRun even a short one is better than one at all! It will give you more vigor and a clear had to tackle the to-do list!

@MyFitnessGuy @FatGirlsCanRun YOU CAN DO IT!!!! lol

And on and on and on.

So you know what? I got on my sneaker and got out of my jammies and RAN

I ran 2.3 Miles in 25:28 at a pace of 11’03 burning 328 calories.

OH OH! And Lance Armstrong came on at the end of my workout via Nike+ to tell me I recorded a new personal best for the mile! 10’54″. How ’bout that?

Alas, if the only thing I had to combat was a crazy fictional Fat Girl that lives in my head, I might make it through OK. But I’ve been managing a super heavy schedule for the past couple months. I’ve been working with the new bright and shiny concept that if it’s important to you, you schedule, actually write it down in like a planner and stuff, and then, OMG, you do it. I know, it’s a crazy idea right? Actually doing what you say you are going to do when you say you are going to do it. It’s been a revelation.

I’ve had days where every hour is scheduled from 9am till 10pm. And yes, I’ve been a good girl and factored running in that day. But what happens if Mr. SmartyPants decides he’s going to grace us with a story of this childhood imaginary friend and a meeting that was supposed to be a half hour goes to a mind-numbing hour? I cut something from my day and the first thing I cut is running time. Those are days I feel like a orange as it stares down the squeezing machine at the juicing plant. Gulp.

So I’m going to try a new strategy for next week – Scheduling an hour for running and an hour for knitting (Yeah, that’s right I knit. Ain’t that quaint?). This way, if my life squeezes me, I can tease out extra time that won’t effect my running program.

Ah ha! Crazy Fat Girl AND Generalissimo Schedule Beaten!