Exercise Class and Running

I am sore.

I mentioned in a few of my previous posts that I signed up for an exercise class.  Because I wasn't seeing the weight loss I had in mind, I wanted to get back into the swing of things.  I nabbed the same twice-a-week Six Week Slim Down course that I took last year.  In six weeks, I lost 13 pounds and kept it off.  I want to see those results again.

Last night was the first night of the course and I've come to a shocking realization: I haven't been pushing myself hard enough.  In part, it's because I haven't really worked out in the past month or two.  Nearly all of my exercise buddies got too busy and I'm not very good at committing to things without some kind of socialization.  So that went down the pipe.

But my confusion began long before that happened.  I'd been doing two to four separate nights of exercise in the past several months.  How was I not losing the same kind of weight?  Turns out, I haven't been pushing myself hard enough. When I began with the exercise group, it was just shortly after completing the six week course.  I was in the best shape I'd been since shortly after high school, but I was starting to work out with many of my friends who had never really exercised.  I tried to keep the workouts high pace, but it wore many of them out.  I know the girl who joined most recently was unnerved by how hard TurboFire was.  She confronted me that, if the exercises were going to be that difficult every time, she might not be able to continue.  For me, by that point, it was a necessity for it to be that strenuous.  My heart rate just didn't get up as far as it needed to otherwise.

Two things happened over the course of six months.  First, the exercises got much more lax to accommodate my friends who were turned off by how hard it was at the beginning.  Second, I stopped wearing my heart rate monitor because I was tired of seeing little to no movement in calories.  I was still of the mindset that at least I was doing something.  Any exercise is better than no exercise, I thought.  And that's probably true. I may have not been able to maintain my weight without the exercises we did.  I might have gained it all back.

But I certainly wasn't going to lose any of it either.

What last night reminded me of was this: If I don't see my heart rate monitor hit the high notes, if I don't come out looking like a tomato (the side effects of exercise on pale skin), if I don't have sweat marks all over my shirt, I haven't worked out hard enough.

With that in mind, I went to meet my friend Nic for our Wednesday run.  We've been doing this for a couple weeks now.  Despite it raining, we did three miles today.  And I made sure my heart rate stayed up, that my face got red.  In the end, I burned something like 650 calories for the day.  That's only a hundred calories less than yesterday.  Bam.

I'm not the kind of person to make excuses.  I absolutely hated looking at my end weight last month and not being able to sign a proper reason.  I wanted to take fault, but I wasn't sure how.  Now I know.