lesmisloony | Entries tagged with zero to hero

Thanks for fretting with me, guys. I kind of figured it wasn't anything urgent because the doctors in the French hospital told me when I went for my one-week checkup that having made it up eight flights of stairs earlier that day meant I was almost definitely clot-free, and yesterday I did a fifteen minute starter jogging thing again... basically, if I'd had a blood clot in my lungs, I would have passed out, and I knew that, but when that tightness was still there at the end of the day and I had jogged that MORNING I kind of freaked out. I mean, you would if you were me.

BUT I am scheduling a doctor's appointment before my move anyway so I know how to transfer my INR appointments, my rat poison prescription, and I also want to discuss my natural substitutes idea with her... I know American doctors are heavily paid by pharmacies to sign people up for their pills, but I like to think my doctor and I have seen enough of each other that she'll understand and take pity on me. I don't know if I've mentioned it here, but the doctor at the American hospital told me he thought I should take blood thinners indefinitely (that's $12 a month for the pills and at least $30 each time I get my finger pricked to test the INR, which is at least once a month but occasionally more frequently). I did some research and am convinced that taking Omega 3 supplements and focusing my diet on more food that naturally thins blood (I have a list) and harshly limiting anything with vitamin K *should* do an adequate enough job, along with regular exercise and a promise to never again take birth control or sit still for more than a few hours at a time. I want to talk to her about that--I'll even agree to keep getting my finger pricked for the first few months I'm off the rodenticide--and my parents' pharmacist friend. ANYWAY I'm also going to mention my little scare (and the sinus infection I've been fighting since Christmas) when I'm there.

The thing is, I get really really paranoid about any sort of irregular chest thing... obviously. Like, sometimes my bra is too tight and I start writing out my last will and testament. So basically what I assume happened is I went running for the first time in six months on a really fucking cold day after having not-quite recovered from a stubborn sinus infection, and what was left of the infection got agitated in my lungs and irritated me for the rest of the day. By the time I woke up it was gone, and there was no sign of it all day today. Were it another pulmonary embolism, the running probably would have knocked me out and it would be getting worse, not better.

So yeah, no worries, but I will mention it to my doctor within the next couple weeks (and you can bet your asses I'll be on red-alert until then).

dear god please don't let this weird tightness in my chest be another blood clot

ain't nobody got time or money for that

i have been very active since i got back to america and today i actually went running again but when i inhale it feels weird ever since and i want it to just be some chest congestion left over from the cold i had for a couple weeks

american hospitals are such shit and my life is finally coming together so now is not a good time for more hospital, like it's pretty much the worst possible time

hello do you copy

i will eat hummus until my blood is thinner than water if i have to

no more clots please

D:

I did it again today, yay!

Since last time I managed to do five bouts of jogging, this time I hoped to make it to six. I also decided to actually count and make sure I was only walking ninety seconds between each of my sixty-second jogging episodes.

I was feeling pretty tired when I started my fourth jog, to the point where I was breathing really loudly and I knew my face was red as a mofo. My heart had barely settled to a less frightening pace before it was time to start the fifth one, and around the 35 second mark I knew not to push myself for a sixth lap. I was lightheaded and with every new step I just wanted to lie down on the ground in the middle of the park.

Then, surprise of surprises, after I did my last ninety seconds of walking and started my five minute cool-down walk home, I looked at my watch and saw that even though I hadn't pushed myself up to six "laps", I had somehow managed to repeat the process for twenty minutes rather than fifteen as I always did previously. Maybe I'm counting slower or something? But that means I actually did the week one jogging schedule and I survived!

I remembered to stretch my legs this time, and when I was going up the stairs to take my shower I didn't feel like I was on the verge of collapse like I usually do. My face was RED though, like hilariously red, which looks even weirder with my purple-y wine-colored hair.

The shower water felt icy on my face, head, shoulders, and arms, but sort of warm everywhere else, which I thought was really weird. Especially my face. But even now I'm not very sore and I feel all-around alert and good. It took my face an hour to cool down.

I don't know if the redness thing is just my complexion (my dad is ALWAYS red, true story) or if it's a reflection of how out-of-shape I've become after 23 years of avoiding anything that might be exercise. However, I love how every time I run, and this is only the third time, I see progress.

When I move in with my new host family I hope to run in the mornings three times a week, then shower, then eat breakfast. Of course, I don't want to come to the table with my silly red face.

I feel good, though. I feel like I'm pulling myself together and being an adult now. I'm figuring out what I want and who I want to impress (me) and how to take the next steps to live the life I want in the time I have.

Tomorrow the other people who live in this house are coming home (at least two of them are, that is) and I'm wondering how I'll act when I have other people to see me leave and then see me come back in my little running outfit and my scalding red face.

Oh, and if you don't believe that the redness thing is like RIDICULOUS (especially in a country of people with an olive skin tone that barely every fluctuates), I took a picture when I have evidence.

Here's me after the first time I went running (note that the skin on my face is literally the same color as my HOT PINK shirt):

And this is today:

The camera likes to change colors when it takes pictures, but just notice where the skin looks yellowish around my mouth and eyes... THAT'S my skin color. Geez, you can't even tell that my hair is borderline purple in the second picture... boo.

Finally went running again!

I underestimated how good I am at NOT finishing things I start. Gah.

But my first time was Wednesday, and then I felt all weird and sore Thursday, so I was gonna wait till Friday but I stayed up way too late the night before and slept really late Friday and then totally didn't realize how late it was and so I kind of lost that day, then Saturday I went to my boyfriend's to mooch off his food. But today, Sunday, I did it again!

This time I left the house a few hours earlier so I could get to the nearby park before it closed. I did my brisk warmup walk all the way there, and after about one minute I was actually feeling kinda breathless already. EMBARRASSING. But I arrived at the park and obediently broke into a run.

Okay, here's the weird thing. Last time, every time I ran I was convinced I was going to die by the time I got to the thirty-second mark. I did four 60-second bursts of running interspersed with something like three minutes of walking. By my fourth running part, I was so destroyed that I expected to collapse before I got to sixty. Like those last few steps were borderline terrifying. They are quite burned into my memory.

This time, I was only winded between the running bursts (I keep saying running but it was definitely more like jogging) and I was able to eek five of them out! It was getting kinda dicey around the fifty-second mark the fifth time I jogged, but when I slowed to my last walk I even considered going for a sixth one, but I figured I shouldn't push it. I also drastically cut down my walking time between the jogs! The instructions said for them to be 90 seconds each, and I know I was doubling that the first time. This time I think it was closer, though I wasn't counting.

I briskly walked back to the house and FORGOT TO STRETCH WHOOPS I'll do that in a second (even though it's been like an hour... I'm dying my hair this weird shade of purple-red right now) and when I was going up the stairs I was like YIKES at the leg soreness. But in a good way. My whole face was bright red, like country bumpkin in a haystack red, and I was pretty sweaty, but I splashed cold water on me and got out of my sweaty running clothes.

Once I'm comfortable with the 60 seconds of running, 90 seconds of walking for twenty minutes pattern (it was still only about 15 today) I'll up it to "week two" on the plan I copied from google. And once I'm ready to transition from "week two" to "week three" I shall reward myself with legit running clothes for the bottom half of my body. Right now my top half is sporty as hell, but on the bottom half I wear my normal tights and short white pyjama pants. I want to get running person leggings and a cute little skirt like they wear when they play tennis, but I ain't spending any more money on this until I'm sure I'll stick with it.

Anyway, long story short, the second time was dramatically easier than the first (though still pretty exhausting)! Maybe I just knew what to expect or something, or maybe things are actually getting easier? I noticed halfway through my fifth burst of jogging that I felt myself get to a point where it didn't seem so uncomfortable to be moving fast anymore, so I wonder if that's, like, a threshold point that you can pass to actually go long distances the way sporty people do.

I plan to do it again either tomorrow or the next day, no excuses!

SO GUESS WHAT. I have today begun... running. :D

Okay, so the backstory is, as a person who grew up with a mother OBSESSED with weight loss, I'm trying to not be her and to be happy with the body I seem to have inherited from her. I watched her go to the gym all the time and never lose any weight, so I figured gyms/exercising were pointless for me, since they seemed to be pointless for her. Only recently did it occur to me that it wasn't all about losing weight (seriously, when I was a kid even organized sports were something I thought I was doing to try to get skinny, so I figured they were pointless too) but about not letting your body fall apart.

I spent the year working for a really sporty family, like UGH sporty. I also come from a drama-teacher-mom background where I resented the sports half of the school because they got all the funding that the arts needed. Yes, that means that the beginning of Glee was true. My mom was Will Schuester and the whole rest of the world was Sue Sylvester. So yeah. I grew up thinking exercise was pointless since it didn't lead to weight loss AND organized sports were evil.

But lately I've noticed with displeasure that I am a hot mess. It started when running for a train (I was only a few feet away) and arriving on board so breathless I panted all the way to my stop. It was embarrassing. Then I took the kid to the pool my last week of work and ended up swimming two laps to race him, and again I was totally beat by the end. TWO LAPS?!? In college I swam for fun a few times and always got up to at least 50, even 100 before I lost interest! Yesterday I leaned backwards over a railing to try to pop my spine and when I leaned back up I was, you guessed it, out of breath. FROM BENDING OVER BACKWARDS. So I started to worry that I was about to kill myself if I didn't shape up. I'm also tired, like, all the time.

Anyway, I've never done any sort of exercise in my life other than that bit of swimming in college, so I had to start quite literally at nothing. I found a cheap sports store in Paris, Decathlon, where I got two sports bras, two sportsy shirts, and a pair of tennis shoes for about €50. Nice, right? I also found a nine-week plan online to ease yourself into a running routine. The plan wants you to run two or three times a week. I originally intended to only do it once, but after day one I might change my mind. After all, I have literally nothing else to do with myself for the month of August.

Today I brought my exciting new sports clothes home (all in shades of bright pink and blue and purple yayyy why am I so femme all the time) and, since I was already wearing tights and already had my hair in a bun, I changed into my new running outfit. I put some white pyjama shorts on over the tights and hung my keys around my neck (they were given to me on a lanyard). Sweetness!

The instructions for week one are this: "Brisk five-minute warm-up walk. Then alternate 60 seconds of jogging and 90 seconds of walking for a total of 20 minutes." I was like, HA, BRING THAT ON.

Oh it got brought. I felt a little self-conscious as I headed out on my five-minute warm-up walk, but when I passed two other runners going the other way (grinning like an idiot at both of them because somehow I guess I wanted us to immediately be friends) I relaxed a little. I had to remind myself that no one knew it was my first time. No one knew how long I'd been out running or walking, and even if someone was judging me for ANYTHING--my clothes, my unathleticness--ANYTHING, it didn't matter at all. That's a lesson I have to repeat to myself almost daily anyway.

Once a full song and a half had finished on my iPod, I decided the time had come for my first sixty seconds of running. Sixty seconds, I thought? Ha!

I was wrong. Remember the story about being out-of-breath after running a few feet to catch a train? WELL THAT STILL APPLIED. My instinct was to stop running after fifteen seconds--yes, FIFTEEN!--but I pushed on. Around forty seconds I was convinced I was going to die. I could barely breathe and the skin on my face was BURNING. It was nonsense! This is exactly why the running must start.

I barely made it to the word "sixty!" in my head before I happily dropped back into a walk. I was basically wheezing. The plan said to walk ninety seconds before doing another run, but I couldn't do it. I think I walked three minutes before I came to another straight stretch of sidewalk (I meant to do this in a park, but I left the house at 9pm and the park had been closed for an hour) where I threw myself forward and, despite my aching lungs, forced another sixty seconds of running out of myself. After this one I was clutching my side and panting when I fell back to a walk, but I didn't stop. Once I've gotten out of the house, I do whatever it was that I put on a bra for, so help me.

At this point I was really displeased to see that I was less than halfway done with my allotted twenty minutes. I walked probably another three minutes before finally gathering the courage to do another sixty seconds of running. It was harrowing. I think I managed two minutes before I broke into my next run, and by thirty I was ready to collapse but I forced myself to carry on. I was feeling the burn in my legs at this point, and I knew my previously-controlled (ish) panting had just become gasping for air. I wanted to scream when I realized I was only at thirty-five, wondering how in the world I was ever supposed to make it all the way to sixty. Somehow I did, but I was feeling so ragged that I cut the routine short five minutes and "briskly" walked home. I stretched my leg muscles (the internet said to do that after) and went into the house, feeling very smug.

Weird fact: when I got in I suddenly didn't have the urge to snack anymore. I chugged water and took a cool shower (which felt AMAZING, especially on the top of my head, wow) and changed into my comfiest pyjamas.

I think my overall reaction to today's work is just a whole lotta smugness and self-congratulation. I definitely feel good--some of my back pain (from my weird mattress) seems to have eased up a little! Even now my skin is really flushed from the unusual exertion.

It was exhausting and kind of scary, but instead of feeling like "OH GOD, NEVER AGAIN" my reaction is more of a "..sooooon.... yessss" sentiment. I'm very satisfied with my sketchy accomplishments--and pretty horrified at how little stamina I have!

Soooooon.

Also I plan to make this a habit, mostly cause I'm interested in seeing what happens with my progress in this. So it has a tag now. :D