Day One! The excitement begins!

Warning - this is a LONG POST. I will not be offended if you don't make it though the whole thing!

For the last three days, since I signed up for the PCP, I've been thinking about what I'm going to write on my first post. Lots of different things have gine through my head, but of course now that day one is halfway through and I'm sitting down to write my first entry, I don't know where to start! Maybe a little bit about what brought me here in the first place would be helpful.

I can thank Twitter and Gwen Bell (who is one of the thousand-odd people that I follow there) for turning me on to the PCP. I happened to catch one of Gwen's tweets about the PCP, which brought me to the website, which got me to thinking "holy crap, this might be exactly what I need right now". A few emails were exchanged with Patrick, some doubts were quelled, and here I am. I'm really excited to be here because, maybe for the first time ever, I have total confidence that I will be able to see this thing through. I think the whole transparency/blogging portion of the program is totally brilliant - anyway, it hits the nail right on the head as to why I've never been able to really succeed with an exercise or diet plan (even if it just means getting up early and doing some yoga or whatever). However, when "the whole world" could potentially be watching - it kind of reduces one's tendency to want to flake off on the whole thing.

So, let's get right into my first day experiences. I completed my first day exercises (and then some, more on that later) with no major issues. I did 3 sets of 15 squats, 3 sets of 8 "real" push ups (although I pooped out on the very last one) and 3 sets of 15 sit ups. An aside - I can't believe I've never figured out the magic of the push-up grippy bar! I was pretty much resigned to never doing push ups again after shattering my wrist (it complains very loudly if I try to bend it back that way and put weight on it). However, the bars totally redistribute the weight, and make them totally possible, almost easy. Yay!

I must admit that at this point, I have a total love-hate relationship with the jump rope. I bought one a few days ago, and started practising with it seriously yesterday. At first, I just wanted to throw the thing across the yard, I could hardly get through 3 jumps without tripping. Then, all of a sudden I got into a groove and did maybe 30 jumps in a row, and thought "hey, this is kind of fun!" So, yesterday I did a total of around 250 jumps, with 59 in a row being my best number.

So, I felt pretty confident today when I went outside to do my jumps, and immediately a) whacked myself in the wrist with the rope, HARD, b) whacked myself in the head with the rope, HARD, and c) all of the sudden couldn't make it though 5 jumps without tripping. Again. However, after sticking with it, I got through the 250, and it did get easier, although I wasn't able to get up to the 59 in a row that I did yesterday. I'm finding that possibly the most challenging thing about jumping rope is finding a place to do it. As you all probably know by now, it takes a decent amount of clear square footage to do it, and there's literally nowhere in my house that I could do this without moving large heavy pieces of furniture. So, outside it is. The backyard is problematic because the ground is uneven, and I have a bad right knee (torn ACL), and I'm worried that if I come down a little funny on my right side on uneven ground, my knee could go out, which is the last thing I need. So, the other immediate option is the driveway or sidewalk out in front of the house, which I guess is OK for now, but I think once we get into doing more and more jumps, the concrete will be less than forgiving.

Now, it's not like I don't have any other options. I do belong to a gym, and they have a nice room with a padded rubber floor that sometimes gets used for yoga classes where you can just do stretches or exercises or whatever (provided, of course, that there's no yoga class going on). There's also an area at the park where I take my son to play on an almost daily basis that is this very strange sort of squidgy asphalt. It's almost like roofing material or something, but it's on the ground on the playground, and is quite soft and springy (presumably so the kids won't hurt themselves as bad when they fall off the monkeybars or whatever). However, the problem with this is that most of the time there's lots of kids running around, and I wouldn't want to whack one of them with my rope! It is an option, though. I'll probably try the gym for now, but I feel kind of silly going to the gym, jumping rope for 5 minutes, and leaving.

After I finished my exercises and took my son to preschool, I decided to go on a bike ride (he started preschool 2 weeks ago and I've decided that on Wednesdays I'm going to go on a long-ish ride after I drop him off). Today I rode out to Forest Park (which is one of the largest in-city parks in the country) from my house (a little less than 15 miles round trip) then up the fire road that goes through the park (about 6 miles up and another 6 back). When I got to the top I somehow took a wrong turn and ended up going down the wrong side of the mountain, which dumps you out on Highway 30 - which is a 2-lane, 55mph highway - that also happens to have a bike lane (only in Portland!). The whole trip took about 2 1/2 hours. A good ride for sure(28 miles?), and I would be lying if I didn't say that my legs were more than a little jello'd when I finally got home! I need to get a bike computer so I know exactly how far I've gone and how fast I was going.

Now for the diet. I told Patrick that, to be honest, I'm already fairly conscious about my portions. I'm not exactly a "big mac and a large fries" kinda guy. When my wife and I go out to eat, we almost always split an entree. However, even so, I get that I could probably be a little more careful. Patrick advised that I should try to cut my intake somewhere between 25-50%. Normally, for breakfast one of us (whoever gets up first) will do up a scramble for the whole family using 5 or 6 eggs (for 2 adults and one 2-year old - but I swear sometimes he eats more than we do!). However, today Kelly had to get up super early for school, so I ended up just cooking for myself. I did one egg plus one white, and diced up some of these adorable little purple potatoes that were part of this week's CSA share (more on that later in another post). Fried those with a tiny bit of olive oil, a little salt and pepper, and some fresh rosemary from the backyard, added the eggs, et voila! Washed it all down with half a glass of organic strawberry lemonade.

My mid-morning snack was a lemon Larabar which was eaten at the mid-point of my bike ride (sorry Patrick, I ate the whole thing! ;-)). When I got home I was, shall we say, VERY ready for lunch, so I heated up a baguette that I had left over from last night's dinner, cut off about a 4" chunk of it, and made a sandwich with some pepper turkey, tomato slices, fresh pesto and a tiny bit of low fat mayo. Paired that with a SMALL bowl of beet & rosemary soup that I made last week. It was yum.

The main differences between these meals and what I normally would have eaten: if I was cooking breakfast for myself, I probably would have used 2 or 3 whole eggs in my scramble instead of 1.5 . Sometimes if I use 3 eggs I take a yolk out, but sometimes not. Also I would have had a whole glass of lemonade (or OJ or whatever). For lunch I would have had a bigger bowl of soup, would have used 3 or 4 turkey slices instead of 2, and would have probably cut off an extra 2" of baguette. The result? I ate lunch a little before noon. It's now 3:20, and I'm starting to get hungry again. Not too shabby.

I think that's it for now. Congratulations for making it through this extra long post, I guess I had a lot to say (and will probably continue to, as time allows)!