Progress

Welcome back to the worst blog in the world! Remember when it was my goal to update this regularly so that I could keep tabs on my progress?  Those sure were some great intentions that I had. 

I wanted to make this blog to show that it would not be easy but that getting into shape could be accomplished.  I figured I would have a couple setbacks (I could have done without the almost losing a leg part. I have come to another bump in the road. My beautiful 8 year old, non-verbal, autistic son has hit a couple of milestones of his own. We are spending more on his learning tools and health care. (Also, most people also don’t have 8 year olds in diapers). Well, he has gotten bigger than the toddler diapers and so we are moving into specialty diapers and that will cost us twice as much. We have looked at our budget and the easiest way to cover that is to put Crossfit on hold for a while.  I just look at it as another slight set back but I hope with the skills and habits that I’ve learned; I’ll be able to keep up on the progress that I’ve made.

Although I’m not where I thought I would be after this much time, I have definitely made progress.  When I started this in the spring it was very difficult for me to walk from the parking lot to the back of the gym because of the pain.  Over the months I have been able to transfer the pain of walking in, to the pain of working out.  I still have a long way to go but I have hit some important milestones. Here is some of the progress that I have made:

April                                                                November
Weight/ 278                                                    Weight / 235 (Need another 20 at least)
Waist 42                                                          Waist 38 (Yeah, I'm still big)
No walking or jogging during WODs             Still hate running but I can jog for the warm ups
26 lb Kettle bells                                             53 lbs Kettle Bells
Hang clean 75 lbs                                            Hang Clean 135 lbs
Push Press 95 lbs                                             Push Press 155 lbs
Bench Press     275 lbs                                     Bench Press 295 lbs
135 lb raised dead lifts                                   225 lb raised dead lifts
-What’s a raised dead lift you ask? Something Lindsay made up for me. I still can’t lift if from the ground so I have to put it on 8 inch boxes to start. I am pretty sure that you are supposed to be able to dead lift a lot more than bench press but I guess I will always be weak in some areas.

Burpees down to a 20 inch box                      Burpees down to an 8 inch box
-Still some room for improvement on the burpees although I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do them all the way to the ground.

Jumping Pull Ups one at a time                      I can now do 10 pull ups in a row
Toes to bar (No way)                                      Toes to bar (pretty ugly but I can do them)
40 lb sand bag carries                                      80 lb sand bag carries.
So although I don’t think I would be winning any contest very soon, I have seen some great improvement.  My weight loss has slowed a lot but it’s still going down. My road to being semi fit, has taken a lot longer than I had hoped.  Those infomercials about 30 day abs or P90X are a bunch of crap.  Those results were from people who were already in shape or something because I don’t think you can be completely transformed in 3 months.  It took me a long time to get that out of shape, it will take a lot longer to get back into shape.
I think the biggest change between then/now; when I started Crossfit, I knew two people in the class. My friend Darce is the one that talked me into trying it and my friend Maurizio is the one that I made take the class with me. Since that time, I have met so many great, awesome people that have been a great support to me and who have become great friends. (They probably don't think the same about me, but I still feel very lucky to have met them.)
I don’t know what I am going to do with this blog yet.  It’s already pretty awful but I will probably keep it and just track my efforts to continue to eat good and get regular exercise. Maybe I can just use it to complain about people cause I’m a crotchety old man?  It’s not all bad news though. I’ll finally be able to catch back up on the Saved By the Bell reruns that are on every morning.  You never know what kind of crazy hijinks those zany kids are going get themselves into.  

278 lbs

235 lbs

I really do think that I'm a fairly easy going person (don't ask my wife) and that I can get along with most people. One of the great things about Crossfit is the friendships that I have made with a lot of different people. Even with those friendships and my easy going personality, there are 8 people that go to Crossfit that I just can't stand. Some are guys some are girls. I know I shouldn't feel like that. I'm not going to name any names because they may not know that I dislike them, and some of them I don't even know their names. (Ok maybe I am a shallow person).

As I said, I'm not going to name any names but I think a lot of other people don't like them very much either. Just because I won't name any names doesn't mean that I won't give you a clue. Here it is:

I HATE THE EIGHT OTHER PEOPLE THAT FREAKIN FINISHED AHEAD OF ME BUT WERE TOO TIRED TO FILL THE BACK ROW SLOT!!! Ok, so maybe I only hate 7 of you because one of the first bars would have been a corner slot but seriously, are you all really so tired that you couldn't put your bar away in the back middle slot.  I mean, I realize it does take a little bit of extra effort to have to put it back there but it takes a whole lot more effort when I have to put my bar away around these other ones. 
So here's a couple of slogans for a few of my Crossfit "Friends".
-Crossfit: Your warmup is our workout, but our cool down.....meh.
-Crossfit: Giving it 110%.....but just during the WOD
-Crossfit:  Really cool people except for 7 or 8 chumps, probably the same ones that do Steroids.

(Ok, so that last one was a stretch)

Anyway, thank you for letting me make fun of some select people.  I'm excited to say that I have been making some improvements on several exercises so I'll go back to reporting on that cools stuff next time.

I think that to stay healthy in Crossfit, you definitely need to take advantage of the rest days.  Not even the regular rest days every week, but I occasionally, your body just needs a break.  For some reason, between the normal WODs and some that I've had to modify, I had to do hang cleans last Friday and Saturday and then we did them again on Monday and the back of my neck and shoulders were pretty beat up.  I finally decided to not even look at Tuesdays WOD and just take a day off.
I thought I'd be able to not even think about it but the Facebook community wouldn't let me go without thinking about it.  People started posting how horrible Tuesdays WOD was and how they had wished they had stayed home and how they barely even finished the WOD.  An average person would read these comments and be happy that they had missed out but because I'm crazy, I was actually a little envious that they had all got to go through this terrible torture together and that I wasn't there to partake in this painful experience.  I've apparently become a masochist maybe? I do see people that don't take rest days and I've even been tempted at times to skip the rest days.  I mean, when you feel good, keep it going right?  This along with skipping the warmups/cool downs has made Crossfit the best thing to ever happen to Physical Therapists and Orthopedic Surgeons.
Maybe I just need to stay off of Facebook on my days off too. Crossfit Facebookers are straight up crazy but I could fill up a whole other page going off on that.

So my goal for when I started this blog was to lose the 40 lbs that I had gained since I got injured last year.  The good news is I'm finally down 40 lbs from when I started this blog! The bad news is that I'm still obese so I apparently thought I was more in shape than I really was back then.  But that's a good milestone to hit and I'm happy with it even if it took longer than I had planned.  We are still sticking to Paleo most of the time although we allow ourselves one cheat meal a weak and we probably go overboard.  For instance, on Sunday we had Costco mac and cheese with french bread and butter and pumpkin chocolate chip cookies.  We did throw in some cut up fruit just to pretend like it was semi healthy but that meal was about as unpaleo as you could get.  It was the Bizzaro Paleo meal.  Although that fits because sometimes I'm pretty sure that I'm the Bizarro version of me and somewhere out there is the regular version of me that's fit and can do box jumps and is nice to people (My exact opposite).

I did have a setback last Monday.  As I've discussed, the muscles in my legs are always "flexed" at all times.  In the regular human, when one side of a muscle is flexed, the other side is relaxed.  In my legs, both sides of the muscle are flexed at all times. It's why I suck at doing box jumps and double unders (That and I'm apparently still obese.) A couple of times a year the pressure on my back will just "give up" and I'll feel a pop and it's bad news.  I know that when it happens, I have about a half hour before it's swells up so badly that it's pinching the nerves up and down my spine so that I basically can't move for a few days and even after that, I'm walking with a cane for another week.  I mean, I am always complaining on here about a sore back but during these episodes, I literally can't roll over. Well this time, it happened while I was in Crossfit.  I have seen several people injure themselves there because they don't warm up properly or they don't do an movement like they were taught.  I don't think I warmed up as I should have but I don't actually know if it was Crossfit that caused my back to pop. (The last time it happened, I was just bending over to make our bed.) So I can't really say if it would have happened or not because this happens to me a couple of times a year.  What I can say is that I hurt it on Monday and I was able to stand again by Tuesday with the help of a cane. By Thursday I was able to walk without the cane and by Friday I was back at Crossfit. So I was pretty happy about that.  Unfortunately, I'm in for a lifetime of pain but I can definitely say that I healed a lot faster from this episode, than I have done in the past and I truly believe it is because of workouts that we do that is helping to strengthen my core.  I imagine eating better has helped keep the inflammation down too.  A couple of sports rehab guys tell me that there business is better than ever because of injured Crossfitters.  I believe that to be true but I think a major reason for that is as I stated, they don't warm up properly. They show up late and go straight into the workout. Or they sacrifice good form for heavier weight. 

So although I had the setback, I am very sure that I healed faster and am still better off because of the eating plan and workouts that have been set up at Crossfit The Club. (Although, I think I'm better off, I still reserve the right to complain and hate being there every morning.)

10-8-12 Down 40 lbs but still obese.

The beginning April 11

Hello?  Is this blog still even a working blog?  I haven't given up on my quest to be healthy, it just hasn't quite gone as well as I had hoped.  When I first made the decision to try to get back in to shape, I figured I would be down 60lbs in after 6 months.  Well, it's been almost 6 months and I'm down 30lbs. Obviously there was a couple of setbacks, like almost losing a leg and such, but the journey has been too boring for me to record every day. 

People keep asking me if I feel a lot better because I'm down 30 lbs but sadly, I don't.  My whole goal was to not be in a wheelchair anytime soon. Unfortunately, we've kind of gotten to the realization that the pain is here to stay and now it's constant, even when I'm sitting down. So now my goal is to try to do whatever I can to at least lessen the pain and postpone being in a wheelchair. So that's what I'm striving to do now. 
(These are my beginning and halfway point pictures. Apparently I'm so much more healthy now that even the whole room looks brighter)

April 11

Sep 24

Sep 24

I am still trying to show up to Crossfit at least 3 times a week and try to do the WODs even if I have to modify parts of the workout.  The problem is, it seems like I am starting to modify more and more of the WOD. About the only thing I can do correctly is bench press but that's not in very many WODs. I did find a really cool/painful sports massage that helped to stretch the fibers that surround the muscles so that the muscles in my legs and back could lengthen out to where they should be.  That worked great and I was actually able to stand up straight afterwards. That was great but by morning everything had constricted back into the tight knots that I'm used to.  Yeah, it worked great but they want almost $200 bucks a month to keep doing it.  (I'm trying to see if I can get a job as a school-bus monitor and get video'd being bullied.  That lady made almost $900K from people sending her donations after that happened to her.  If I can get video'd and rake in money like that, I'll definitely go back and do more massage sessions). Until then, I'll keep with my stretching routines and see what else I can do. 

I don't want this whole thing to sound like I'm complaining or making excuses, I'm not.  I still have goals to meet and I will.  We are still eating Paleo most of the week although we allow ourselves one cheat meal a week because I'd go crazy if I didn't.  We did find a cool trick to making your own paleo mayonnaise.  One of the biggest problems with the paleo diet that I had seen was making mayo was a pain because you had to mix everything in the blender while pouring in the oil a little at a time.  If you did it wrong, it all clumped up it was too runny.  Well, we learned a little trick that if you put all of the ingredients, with the oil on the top,  and then use a hand/wand mixer it works perfectly.  You basically, put the wand at the bottom of the cup and turn it on and pull it to the top. Repeat once or twice more and it's the same consistency of store bought mayo.  It's awesome.  It seriously takes less than a minute. It's basically made our lives a lot easier because now we can make sandwiches, or broccoli slaw, etc and not be a big pain in the backside. I even made a video of it but then I decided that it was probably the most boring video ever made so I decided not to post it. 

So anyway, my new goal is to still lose another 30 lbs before Christmas if I stay out of the hospital for any unforeseen crazy leg infections, etc.  My other goal is to try to report on here more than once a month.  Trust me, you don't want me to post everyday because it would be so boring that you would feel that you were getting bullied.

Paleo Bread

One of the things that I won't deny is that I'm addicted to bad carbs (crackers, chips, breads etc.) So while we've been eating paleo for the past 3 months, Katie's been able to make things that are great and I haven't been hungry but I have been craving bread.  So I was excited when I read that there was a product named Paleo Bread.
 

I had been searching for a couple of months now and I saw that Good Earth was selling it.  So I went and bought a loaf.  The loaves are actually pretty small, like the little loaves of banana bread.  They are also pretty expensive for the size, almost $7, but I figured I'd give it a try because I was craving bread.  They have it in almond or coconut so I chose the almond.

I got it home and tried a piece plain but it was actually really chewy, almost like chewing wet paper, and didn't have much of a taste to it.  So I decided to try toasting it and putting honey on it.  So I toasted a piece but it didn't turn brown, so I toasted the same piece 2 more time (I'm seriously not kidding) and it didn't burn, it didn't even turn brown.  That's kind of strange but whatever, I put on a little bit of butter and honey and tried to eat it. I don't know how to explain the taste other than kind of chalky.  I'm hoping someone I know buys some and tells me if I'm being over dramatic because I'm not.  So to compare it with something else, I made a one minute almond muffin and still love the one minute muffins whereas the Paleo bread....not so much.  Finally to do a more comparable taste test, I wanted to test it against something that it was more similar to.  So, I went and cut out a piece of sheetrock, toasted it and put some butter and honey on it.  

Here's where they compare:

-Nutrition: Obviously the Paleo Bread is more nutritious

- Taste: The sheetrock was slightly better in taste

-Consistency: That's a tie, if you were to wet down the sheetrock a little you couldn't really tell a difference.

-Cost: The Sheetrock was definitely a better deal.  $9 for a 4ft by 8ft sheet compared to $7 for a tiny loaf of Paleo Bread.

In my opinion, after waiting so long I was sorely disappointed by the Paleo Bread in almost every way.  I'm hoping someone else buys some and tells me that I just got a bad loaf.  Until that time, I'll stick with making my own one minute muffins and eating the occasional piece of drywall.

 

 

Since it's been another long time since I wrote anything I'll just post a couple of quick thoughts about the WODs last week.

 On Monday, it was:

12 Dead lifts-155 Lbs

9 Hang Power Cleans-155 lbs

6 Push Jerk-155 lbs

repeat for 5 rounds.  

That is set up with what is supposed to be the easiest doing the most reps down to the hardest thing doing the least amount of reps.  But, because I still can't bend, it was the opposite for me.  The deadlifts were definitely the hardest part and the push jerks were the easiest.  I actually had to modify the dead lifts so that I just basically did a "hang" deadlift instead of one off of the ground.  Needless to say, I was the last one done.

Tuesday was

50-35-20 reps of:

Wall Ball- 20 lbs

Pull-ups

Double Unders

The wall balls were bad but that's 105 Freakin pull ups.  My hands almost tore on that one.  I still need to lose a bunch more weight.

Wednesday was

10 Wall Walks

Row 500 m

40 Slapping Push-ups

30 KB OH Walking Lunge- I did 35 lbs in each arm.  You're supposed to do 55

20 Sandbag Cleans-80 lbs

30 Clapping Push-ups

20 KB OH Walking Lunge

10 Sandbag Cleans

Row 500 m

10 Wall Walks

The worst part of this for me was definitely the wall walks. You are supposed to be in push up position with your feet against the wall and then slowly push yourself backwards and walk up the wall till your doing a hand stand.  My shoulders were shot for the next two days.

Thursday was

Run 465m (3 laps)

4 Tabata Intervals of Double Unders

Run 465

3 Tabata Intervals of Double Unders

Run 465

2 Tabata Intervals of Double Unders

Run 465

1 Tabata Interval of Double Unders

 I rowed instead of ran and I still can't jump high enough for double unders.  Still the last one done.

Friday.

Rest day (Thank goodness)

Saturday

1-5 CTB Pull-ups Ladder x 6

1-5 Burpee Ladder x 6

10/15/20 AD Ladder x 6

10/15/20 Squat Ladder x 6

 This was in teams of two and so the first person would do 1 Chest to Bar pull up and then the second person would do one.  Then 2 and 2, 3 and 3 etc until you each did 5 and then you'd start over at one and do it for 6 rounds.  It really doesn't sound that bad until you realize that you and your partner each did 90 of them and then you move to the burpees and do the same thing.  By the time I was done with burpees I had to crawl over to the Airdyne but I didn't think it would be that bad because I only saw the 10/15/20 calories.  I didn't realize that you each had to do that amount of calories and then repeat 6 MORE FREAKIN times.  Doing 10 or even 20 calories on the airdyne really isn't that bad and goes fairly quickly until you realize that your partner actually goes fairly quick with each one so you don't really get a very long rest.  This thing took for ever.  By the time we finished with the bikes, my arms and legs were jello and then we had to do the same thing with squats.  This WOD took us an hour.  The next class was already starting before we finished.  My legs and arms are still pretty much useless today.  Good thing today was rest day.  You know what's horrible about all of this?  It looks like I'll be back again tomorrow for more abuse.  I'm an idiot, what can I say.