R11D8 – Rest, Credit and Critique

i-hate-rest-days2It was a time constraint that forced me into taking my rest day, and as usual I was not happy about it. However, I am committed to rest and so I also made the quality decision to get to bed at 1030 in order to take full advantage of my resting. It also gave me an opportunity to look at my week and decide what the shortcomings were. It’s something that I don’t think people do enough when they finally decide to take charge of their workouts. It’s easy enough to plan, but evaluating your past week and addressing how you felt about it is a completely different skill. Even if your choice is to go with a 90 day program like T25 or P90X3 you should still evaluate at the end of each week what you got from it and if there are any issues that need work. For example, like many people who do or did P90X I was less than thrilled with Yoga and Kenpo. Eventually I decided to replace them both with something more appropriate to my goals. This time around, knowing that P90X3 may have shortcomings with it’s cardio days I have decided to evaluate all the workouts first and then develop a schedule from what I learn. To be honest, what I learned from the first week is that the only things worth doing again were P90X Agility X and T25 Total Body Circuit. But at least I know and what I also know is that I have gone through most of the phase 1 workouts so things are, I think, about to get bananas. At least I hope so.

Since I had my back surgery in April, I have understandably been relatively inactive compared to the last few years but I have to give myself a little credit because I am only 9 months post op and I am in almost every sense back to where I was. I would even have gone so far as to say I was there when we went to Cuba in December, only 8 months after. Now I haven’t been posting here for 10 years since my first surgery but I do have an interesting excerpt from my personal blog that I was writing at the time.

I started back on January 12th with complete and utter disregard for my New Year’s Resolution to start Jan 1 with a strict regimen of walking. I started off with just 20 minutes a day but rapidly realized that unless I was going to push myself to get back as quickly as possible then the whole process was going to be excruciatingly painful. So I went from a sedate 20 minutes 4 days a week in the beginning to 45 minutes every day within the first month. Of course, my weight remained resolutely high, determined that it could outlast my will. We have, of course, had this fight before, I think in terms of score, we are about even. However, this time I was not to be discouraged. I was determined that if I was going to change some things in my life, then I had to change some things in my life. Simple, right? Well, actually yes, it is. If you think about it, I wanted to change my health, my weight and my habits, so I had to change the support system on which those things relied. It was time to start felling the tree at the base, rather than trimming the top with nail scissors.

The amazing thing about this is that I wrote that in mid March of 2004, a full 14 1/2 months after my surgery. What I realize now is that the second time around I had learned enough from the life changing disaster that was my first surgery to make the second one seem like an outpatient corn removal. Check this out:

Today was a wonderful day weather wise which is so much better for rehab than the dead of a Canadian winter. I was able to get out and walk twice again today for a total of 1.6km or so, slightly ahead of my projected goal of 1.5k. I will try for 2k tomorrow but I think that I should stick with that for a few days, my leg was sore, I had some hip pain and the speed was noticeably diminished at the end of the walk.

That was taken from DAY 2 OF MY RECOVERY!! Even I have a hard time reconciling that it took me 14 and a half months to get to the point that should have taken 2 days. It makes me sick to realize just how much of my life I wasted on that first recovery but as they say, you can’t cry over spilled milk. That’s why this time I was so resolute in my decision to push as hard as I could to get up and about and with pretty impressive results. Yes, it’s been 8 months and I am still at the same place I was after about 2 months but that said my pain level is much improved and I can comfortably blame some of my inactivity on my lingering sicknesses.

All of that because I took one day off after 7 in a row, and yes, I am happy to report that once again I hate rest days. Today will be P90X3 again and hopefully another 6 in a row until my next rest day. Also, tomorrow I find out how much weight if any I have lost this week as it’s week 2 of the biggest loser weigh in…

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