I’m trying to get past 43 minutes
It’s the limit of what I can do on the elliptical trainer. I started out doing twenty-odd minutes in the first week of December and now I’m trying to work up to an hour. It held at 36 minutes for awhile and now I can’t break 43. Today it was only 40. I hope I can start running (broken toe-willing) this spring.
When I was about 18 and was at my thinnest (and I felt, prettiest) a friend of mine told me, “You look like you should be carrying a wooden milk pail in each hand!” I was devastated. She’d seen right through my efforts towards gamine-hood and right into my Russian/Jewish peasant past. I will never be a sylph.
Give me a famine! I’ll survive it. Give me a field to plow, turnip seeds to sow and pigs to slop and I’ll do it. I’m strong, I’m sturdy and I’m stubborn. And, I’ve realized, I don’t manage well without lots of aerobic exercise.
Since I started working out again I haven’t gotten much thinner (leaner, maybe, but not thinner) but my mood has improved by leaps and bounds. My temper has cooled, too, making me more fun to be around. I panic less, I’m more confident and my insomnia shows up much less often. And I’m much more focused in my writing.
Pre-December I kept telling myself I couldn’t give up Madison’s nap time to exercise because I needed that time to work. But the truth was (and it took me a long time to get honest with myself) my mind was too muddled to get much done in that hour of kid-free time. I started working out with the kids down here with me — it was only twenty minutes after all. They’d flip out to High School Musical (”get your head in the game” being Noah’s — not mine — favorite work-out song). Noah would run around dancing and Madison would jump on her mini-trampoline. Then twenty minutes got to be not enough time so I started working out in the evenings but that began to eat into the rest of our lives (Hebrew school and writing group and visits from in-laws) so now I’m usually doing it while she naps and I’ve discovered that I do more in the less time I have to work.
So forty minutes four times a week (working towards an hour) and I’m going to add strength training this week in the hopes that this will spur on my in-shape efforts. I want to be ready when that famine hits and I have to start planting turnips.
Go Dawn! I’m stuck at 35 minutes, both running and on the elliptical (I know intellectually that if I can run 5K in 34 minutes, I should be able to do much more on the elliptical, but when I see the clock roll around I fold).
Honestly, a milkmaid sounds much more attractive to me than a sylph or a gamine.
what? 43 minutes is a LOT!! Whoa.
I usually only do a half hour, but with a bunch of other stuff. (strength things)
That’s very inspiring. Way to go.
make a cd mix that is 45 minutes of fabulous music. You don’t need to do an hour, 45 minutes is perfect.
I do half hour yoga every day alternating with 1 hour, I only started two weeks ago so my body is getting used to it.
excercize is great, it keeps you positive and makes your clothes look better on your body.
You may kill me for posting this, but Happy (belated) Birthday, Dawn.
I hope you had an extra-super-special day.
Also, I hope you enjoyed a little cake in light of your excercise regimine.
That’s a long time on the elliptical, good for you.
I have to get back in the habit of working out on my lunch break. But I HATE it. Ugh. I like to work out early in the am which just isn’t possible these days. But I don’t use my lunch time very productively, just internet surfing, which I do throughout the day anyway in between getting stuff done.
When the kids are grown up and we’re all old and gray, do you think we’ll be able to spend time unproductively without worrying about it? That would be nice…
Good for you. I don’t think that these days I could make it for thirty minutes.
And thanks for getting me off my ass and back to the yoga and meditation I’m supposed to be doing right now. It has cut into my computer time, but helps my sleep too. And while I don’t want to lose weight, I feel better when I’m fitter.
A friend of mine in college once declared, “we have Irish potato-digging hands, luolin, look at those stubby fingers!”. I’m still self-conscious about my fingers. (At least he wasn’t commenting on my figure, which was a lot smaller then anyway.)
I don’t think I ever did 40 minutes, even back when I was doing the elliptical more regularly because it was easier on the plantar fasciitis than the treadmill.
I have to tell you that this year I started running for an hour every other day and still didn’t have much movement of the scale or my clothes. It wasn’t until I broke down and hired my wonderful personal trainer, Luda, to do strength training that life has changed dramatically. I hate to admit it (about as much as I hate strength training) but strength training is necessary once you hit 40. I can give you Luda’s number…
So does that mean I have three more years before I have to do strength training?? Actually I really like to lift weights and used to do it seriously in my teens and early twenties. I can’t afford to join a gym so I’m just going to start with handweights at home and work on building core strength. Being the aforementioned peasant-type, I bulk up really quickly so I have to be careful or I start looking like Lou Grant in drag.
(Which is to say, even strength training will not make me thin — it just makes me sturdier. This is why thinness can never never never be a goal for my working out because it will not happen. But shifting some fat to muscle is always a Good Thing so I will settle for that instead of a smaller dress size.)
43 minutes?! Wow, that’s really good, girl!
I have an elliptical. I have one. Gathering dust. Maybe you’ll inspire me here.
I’m a mesomorph and am generally thick rather than fat. But with Luda’s work (BTW, she comes to my house and uses my equipment, dumbbells, stability ball, BOSU, and elastic bands) I have dropped one size so far and look cut, never bulky.
I too will never been “thin” in the white woman sense of the word.
But that isn’t my goal. I want to be defined, less jiggly, and slimmer. My goal was simply to get out of my size 14s and into 12s. I’m halfway there. 
I love to read your Luda entries anyway because I think you’re pretty dang funny!
You’ve got to hear me do her accent! She is so cute.