I met Cindy yesterday...and she made me cry.

Yesterday I met Cindy. Crossfit names a lot of their workouts after girls and this was my first real WOD (workout of the day). We've been doing my assessment to record where I am at and E has been showing me correct form in all of the different workouts.

The Cindy workout consisted of:

• 5 pullups (or 10 jumping pullups for me since I've never been able to do one...yet)
• 10 pushups (again, girl pushups for me since I'm a weakling)
• 15 air squats

And you have to do as many rounds as you can in twenty minutes. The beauty of crossfit is that I can get more of a workout in 20 minutes than someone can who spends two hours at the gym. This blog explains it below:

Striving for efficiency

The second hurdle, “not having enough time”, is overcome by applying a basic law of physics to the workout system.

Power = Work done over Time

Power = Amount of weight moved a given distance divided by Time.  The less time involved the better. That means doing 100 pushups in 5 minutes is a better workout than doing it in 30 minutes. Some people have it programmed in their head that spending less than 30 minutes in a gym is not a good work out. They spend a good deal of time resting, waiting for equipment, talking, or wondering if they should do another set. You will never catch someone rushing from workout to workout in a regular gym.

Aside from interval training which is also an element of Crossfit, time is the enemy and workouts are designed to be as fast and intense as possible. You wouldn’t think it possible to get the best workout of your life in 10 minutes but it happens all the time.

By minute 11 I was really struggling mentally more than anything. I actually started crying mid-pull up. I've never had to push myself like this before. I'm the type of person that LOVES my comfort zone and will do whatever I can to stay in it. If that means avoiding situations that will take me out of it than I'll do what it takes. I pushed through the tears and by minute 15 I was back in the game. By the end of 20 minutes I was exhausted but I was so proud of myself for making it to the end. Every ounce in my body wanted to quit but I didn't.

I kept telling myself over and over again "This exhaustion and pain is temporary," and the beautiful thing about it was it was true! Shortly after the workout I felt great. That was only 20 minutes of giving my all for the entirety of the day. Granted, there are more workouts that can be longer but I look forward to seeing the results.

You would've never caught me doing a pull up prior to this haha.
By the way...that isn't sweat on my shorts, it's the design.

See? :) 

I read a quote the other day that said something like "If you look pretty after your workouts, you must be doing something wrong." My face is bright red, covered in sweat and the makeup I forgot to take off was running all over so I must've done something right! 

Get some! My little cross fitter :)

9:53

9:53. That's the time I ran my mile in yesterday. Although this number may be slow or insignificant to others, I'm pretty proud of it. I haven't (knowingly) ran a full mile since the 8th grade. When I went to the public school I had to do it every year and I hated it, so I went into yesterday's run with no sense of hope. I fully expected to get it done in 12-13 minutes. My thought process the whole time was "This is only 12 minutes of your life. 12 minutes of suck. Only 12 minutes where you feel mucous building up in your lungs. Only 12 minutes of ridiculously sore calves from the day before. After 12 minutes, you are done. The pain is temporary. It will end." And it did.

After catching my breath we did three rounds of burpees, air squats and pull ups. I hate burpees with a passion. The best way to describe them is falling into a pushup formation and then jumping up in the air. Over and over and over. It's a killer ab workout but I felt awful afterwards. Once my body caught up with itself however, I felt great. I slept wonderfully last night and I have so much energy today! I already am noticing less bloating since I'm eating healthier and my mind is clear. On top of all of this I was having some bad hormonal/sadness issues in the morning and after running the endorphins that kicked in brought some balance back. If all of that doesn't motivate you to exercise than I don't know what will!

On another note, here is a picture or two from our unsuccessful yard sale. We made a few 20's but it's not what I had hoped for. All my portions of the earnings were going to go towards starting up this new project so hopefully we will be more successful when we sell at a friend's house (in a better location) this Saturday!

Baby for sale!

Garbage In, Garbage Out

When Ethan and I first started dating, I made him watch the Notebook with me. He immediately pointed out how the whole story was about a girl that couldn't make up her mind and ended up cheating on her fiance in the name of love. How is that ok? In fact, how are most chick flicks ok? They are all about cheating and going between two guys. Why is it not ok for a guy to feed his mind with movies that promote nudity, drugs or perverse humor but it's ok to feed a girl's mind with unrealistic expectations or a skewed version of what true love looks like?

It really bothers me how movies or soaps directed towards women try to play into their emotions. Think about it, we start off at a young age watching disney movies, hopeful that we all will find our prince charming. Then we are hooked on chick flicks that promise a perfect, well-rounded guy. And then we are lured into soap operas that make us believe it's ok to cheat because we may "no longer be in love" or maybe we "jumped into love too soon". Garbage in, garbage out. I've really began to see how what I watch or listen to or who I hang out with affects my everyday decisions and thought process.

I honestly feel like a lot of these movies and shows are like pornography for the girl. They fill a girls mind with all these expectations of what her husband (or boyfriend) should look like and when he doesn't meet up to the standard, then there's an excuse to cheat or an excuse to disrespect him. I write all of this because lately I've noticed a disrespect in myself towards my husband. I hate admitting it but it's been eating away at me. I'm going to be praying more about having respect towards him regardless of his imperfections. I'm also going to be paying closer to attention to what I watch/listen to and participate in. This journey we are on is about bringing glory to God and if this means removing people in my life that don't bring me closer to Him, filtering through the things I say and do and keeping His word close to my heart so I won't be led astray, than bring it on!

On a side note, last night I started my first day of Crossfit with Ethan. We did an assessment to see how many burpees, push-ups, air-squats pullups, etc. I could do in a certain amount of time. The goal is to beat myself every week. I'm a little sore (those air squats are a killer) but he gave me this awesome drink that promises you won't be sore the next day. Today I'm running a mile, rowing 500 meters for time and doing box jumps. I'm very excited to see how much better I will feel after getting into these good habits.

Here's to Health!

Kaiden has changed my life. I can't even begin to tell you how much I've learned about God, myself, what it means to be a parent, other people and more just from the ten months I've had him. It's because of him that I've learned to appreciate my free time and re-prioritize a lot of different things. One thing I've decided to start doing is get into the routine of exercising and eating healthy again. I've been feeling real lethargic lately and I think it's because of lack of exercise and food choices. I've been blessed with an incredibly fast metabolism and since my body has bounced back to what it looked like before Kaiden, I still choose the cheeseburger over the salad. You can be skinny but still be out of shape. I can get away with this since I'm young but I can already tell how this affects me and I can only imagine how it will affect me when I'm older. So over these next few weeks I'm committing to a change. Since I pretty much make everything from scratch, this won't be incredibly drastic but I'm going to try making substitutions in my recipes and increasing the amounts of fruits and veggies I take in. This extends beyond appearances. This is about health and being able to be the best mom I can be for my kids.

I need all of the above. Bring it on exercise and healthy foods!