Move

You can eat all the kale in the world and it won't help you build muscle or improve your heart and lungs.  Eating healthy is the first step towards maintaining a healthy weight.  Whether that means you need to increase how much you eat or decrease, you need to eat.  Food is fuel.  Fuel for what you ask?

My first 5K -  September 2014 - South Hadley, MA

Fuel for picking up heavy things and putting them down again.  Fuel for running, biking, hiking, swimming, Zumba, salsa dancing, or just surviving a long day of work and kids and cleaning a chicken coop or shoveling the freaking snow.  

You need to move.  You need to stretch.  There is no way around this.  A healthy diet can only take you so far.  You know that.  Everyone does.  Here's what I didn't know a year ago:

1. Your back doesn't have to hurt!  I thought it was just part of hitting forty, but honestly of all the things this is the best.  My legs, my arms, my back, hell even my mid section all feel a hell of a lot firmer and stronger.... by my god damn back doesn't hurt!!!  Its amazing!!

2.  You can open jars! I haven't had to ask anyone to open anything for me in months. Its difficult to pronounce yourself a strong, independent feminist when you need a dude to open the spaghetti sauce.  

3. Carry your own bags of animal food and/or cat litter.   I carry my own fifty pound bag of chicken feed to the register while also shouldering a purse and a twenty pound bag of cat food at Tractor Supply... and wait in line without having to put anything down!  You want to feel like a bad ass?  Haul your own bales of hay into the Subee and call that shit done.  Perfect strangers will offer to help, see that you got this shit and back off.  I cannot express to you how this feels.  

4. Building strength is a lot faster than you think.  I really thought it would take me a year at least to see any improvement.  It didn't.  It took around three months for me to start feeling the difference in my every day life.  I can tell you with certainty that a year later there is virtually not a single part of my body that doesn't feel, look and behave differently than it did.  

5. Its never too late to start.  I thought I would get to a point and stop improving or progressing.  I was so, so wrong.  Never, ever let your age stop you.  In fact, our age is exactly what gives us an edge.  We are better able to have discipline, to stick to something, we aren't as flighty or hungover as the twenty-somethings!  We have more reliable transportation, bigger paychecks, and babysitters.  Its really a win for us older folks.  

6. You don't have to workout for hours five days a week to reap the benefits. I work out on average three days per week.  That's it.  Sometimes just twice.  Most of these workouts are on average 30-45 minutes each.  I'm not doing this to win a competition, I'm doing this for my health.  So that on my 60th birthday I can still reach my shoes and hike a trail, so that on my 70th birthday I'm walking straight and tall.  This entire journey is about being alive and healthy for the rest of my life.  That what takes me out isn't diabetes or heart disease, but a frigging tiger chasing me through the jungle on my 80th birthday safari.  You get the point.

Some people do yoga, some do the C25K program, some lift weights and others take classes.  I highly, highly recommend the C25K program.  It was life changing for me.  I mean that.  Crossing that finish line the first 5K I completed was the proof I needed that I could do anything I wanted to.  

I'm about to begin a new workout called Tribe Training.  Tribe Fit (this is the one I've signed up for) and Tribe Life are coming to Healthtrax.  In fact, it was this that got me thinking about a new blog as a way to track my progress.  You can follow me on the blog where I'll be posting stats, before and afters, and generally bitching and whining about how sore I am.   

 Tribe Training is fairly new to the USA, but its essentially a small group (up to 10) fitness program that challenges participants to be their own best.  To challenge themselves, to push to a new level of fitness.  It meets twice per week for fifty minutes.  I've done a few practice workouts and it is incredible.  Its hard!  It should be.  I mean, I want to be the worst or least fit person in the room right now.  I want to work for it, to earn it, to be inspired and encouraged by the others in the room.  I'm hundred percent okay with starting out last, but showing up and doing everything I can to be better, to do more.