Coffee With A. Duck

P90X – Day 4

Yoga |ˈyōgə| - A Hindu spiritual and ascetic discipline, a part of which, including breath control, simple meditation, and the adoption of specific bodily postures, is widely practiced for health and relaxation.

Screw all that crap.  Let me tell you what yoga really is…

The day started like normal, with the angel of near death visiting my bedchambers once again at the same unholy hour.  I stumble downstairs and hear that we’re doing “Yoga X” today.  Oh JOY!  Up to this point in my life, my only contact with yoga has been via Wii Fit, which I am sure is lacking a bit from a full workout since the poses are just one at a time.  Whatever, I have unlocked most of my Wii Fit moves and it’s mainly just standing in bizarre positions and breathing a lot, right?  Right?  How about NO.

When I was in high school, Saturday wrestling practices were the “best” under this one particular coach.  You were going to work your butt off, that was a given, but that’s where the crazy stuff came in.  Like having to climb up that 30″ rope that went floor to ceiling.  No big deal right?  Not unless you were inverted with your feet over your head and had to do it.  THAT had some suck on it, let me tell you.  Or when we would be bridging backwards, resting all of our weight on our head/neck and your tip toes with our chest and belly bottons being pushed up towards the ceiling.  Again, not bad until you are handed a 50lb. weight bar, sometimes with more weights on the end and are told “Here, bench this.” while maintaining that same position.  That dude was a sick twist of a coach as far as that stuff was concerned, but I can say this: we were in excellent shape and we were mentally prepared and most of the time, we won under him.  I actually saw several things today that I recognized and now know that my coach had to have had some brush with Yoga at some point.

So okay, Yoga X.  How bad could it be?  I have never heard a conversation about Yoga where something called “Downward Dog” was spoken of positively and I now know why.  I have already talked about how I recognized that I needed to stretch out a little more and get more flexible overall.  Yep.  Still singing the same song, only today, any shred of doubt about it was erased.  We start in with the warm up. Not bad.  I can stick most of the positions with just little minor adjustments.  The DVD Instructor gives good tips on things to be sure and not do, as well as lists some variations based on your skill level.  Cool, cool.

I thought that we had moved on to the real workout, but apparently we were still in the warmup phase.  I should mention that this particular program is a full 90 minutes long, 50%longer than most of the other programs.  Anyway, we go on and start in on poses and moving from one position to another.  I’m fumbling along, but I’m getting there.  After about 20 minutes in, my body is growing new pores to sweat through because it wasn’t generating enough through the existing ones.  I feel tension building up in my groin and I start thinking how good it is that we’re done having kids because there might not be any coming back from this…and then I hear something that I have never been so glad to hear in my life.  WHUMP!  WHUMP!  WHUMP!  ”DADDEEEEE!”  It’s Abigail who has woken up early.  ”Daddy?  Will you sit with me?”  OH, YOU’RE DARN RIGHT!  HECK YES, I’LL SIT WITH YOU, PUMPkin!!

Saved by a 3-year old.

After some vicious eye-rolling from Crystal, she startes to try to make me feel better by telling me about how hard it was for her a couple of weeks ago when she started doing this particular DVD and how much better it is now.  Mmmhmm…Really glad for you.  So, I sit with Abigail for awhile and then a new section of poses and stretches comes up.  At this point, I start thinking that A) I AM doing this to get in shape and sitting on the couch isn’t going to get me there and B) how familiar will I really be next week if I am still doing some of the moves and poses for the first time?  Fine, fine.  Whatever.  So I jump back in.

The Instructor merrily announces that it’s time to “Bring It,” which is code for “Your life is about to really suck until I say otherwise.”  Now, this is kind of a rhetorical question, but if anyone knows the answer, please post it in the comments for the rest of us.

What the hell kind of pose is this?

Is this REALLY needful and helpful?

I mean, YAY! for physical fitness and all of that, but REALLY?  I think some of our Hindu friends got some bad hookah or lost a bet or something when they came up with this.  It’s like a game of H-O-R-S-E with body contortions and this pose was the “E” that someone went out on and someone was all bitter about it so they gave the pose a name, which made it “legit.”  H-O-R-S-E-S-H- – - – - is the name that I gave it.  I just sat down.  My body straight up declined the offer.  Thanks but no.

So, from there we move into laying on our backs, legs in the air, feet together feeling stuff spread that probably shouldn’t.  ”Now, don’t forget to breathe!” the Instructor chimes.  ”Buuuut my pancreas is constricting my airflow and I think my sternum and xiphoid process just cracked.  Is that bad?”

But it’s cool, I can swing it.  There’s only like 20-30 minutes left and I can tell that we’re about to be done with the feet over the head thing and I’m thinking that I’m in the clear, but I was clearly unprepared for what happened next.  I think that a full description would be filed under “TMI,” so I’ll just give you the end result: I started farting uncontrollably (as if THAT wasn’t TMI!).  I mean, hey, it happens and whatever, but MAN! I was really embarrassed by that!  Usually you have SOME kind of notice, but NOOOOO!  Not today!  Crystal starts laughing to hard that she falls out of her pose, I’m turing red and blue at the same time while trying to find a source of fresh air.  Abigail, who had been trying to pose with us informs me that she doesn’t want to do that part and…wow.  Not my finest moment.

So, through the rest of the falling, not holding my pose, looking up at the TV when I should have been looking somewhere else (head position is crazy important I found out.) and doing what I could to look like the folks on TV, it was…a first time through.  Can’t wait to do it again next week and Crystal better be right about it getting easier.  Better get to bed since I have an”angel visit” here in about 5 hours.  I better drop weight and/or get buffed up or else the P in P90X is going to stand for “Pissed!”  Just sayin’.

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P90X – Day 2

I awoke this morning before dawn to my lovely bride of 11 blissful years gently whispering to me ever so softly, awakening me in such a way that I thought that I was being visited by an angel.  I arose and adorned myself with attire fit for a warrior who was training to defend his true love with his life, if necessary.  Sure, it was 6:15am, but workouts are always better with an angel by your side, right?

Not if it’s the angel of near death experiences.

Crystal and I don’t interact much before the sun comes up.  It’s just better that way.  In fact, some of the worst fights in the history of our marriage came when we had our coffee shop, Espresso dell’Anatra, during the time between when we arrived and when the cafe opened.  When she’s up, she is fully awake, is ON and is all business.  Not me.  Especially if it’s early and I have to leave for an early meeting of some kind, it’s all I can do make sure that I’m wearing pants.  I know, coffee is an odd profession choice then, but that’s another post.  She keeps looking at her watch, tracking the time.  She’s trying to be sweet and nice (especially since it’s the first morning and I actually showed up), but I know her well enough that if I don’t get a move on, I’ll be wasting her time that she’s guarding like a sentinel and she WILL hamstring me.  No, really.

Keep in mind that my last post was at about 10:30pm last night and now it’s 6:15.  After my post, I did that “Ab Ripper” workout and it promptly ripped my abs clean off.  AAAAND WE’RE BACK!  You do the math.  Workout #1 was at about 9:00-10:00pm.  Pause, write last night’s post.  It posts at about 10:30 and I start ripping up my abs/Workout #2 at about 11:15 until 11:30 or so.  Recovery time until about Midnight, then I’m in bed by 12:30.  Workout #3 now starts at say, 6:20am and lasts for an hour.

Kids, don’t try this at home.

Have you heard ever heard of “Plyometrics?”  It’s sometimes called “Jump Training”  That was today and it basically lots of lunging and deep stretches with a LOT of jumping.  This line of exercises is why heart rate monitors were invented.  Now, I could whine and snivel and be funny about what happened over the course of the next hour, but really, my takeaways were twofold: A) I needed new shoes. My old, broken down cross-trainers weren’t going to cut it for actual cross-training anymore, so they got downgraded to “shows that I will mow in” when I brought the new ones home.  About 10 minutes in to Holycrapometrics, it felt like someone had taken newly forged and still hot spear tips and jammed them into the outside edges of the balls of my feet.  Really a crazy and painful feeling and I had to back down for a bit until the cramping subsided.  Bad shoes was probably exacerbated by the fact that B) I realized that the main reason that I am struggling with a lot of these exercises is that my muscles are not stretched out like they should be. I had planned on doing the stretching video tonight to kind of correct that, but I got an extra workout because Crystal volunteered me to a neighbor to move trunk pieces of wood from two trees.  Wow!  Not going to lie.  I was a hurtin’ unit after that one!

At day’s end, Crystal rubbed down my sorest spots with some Mana Oil that we had picked up at a farmer’s market on our recent trip to Hawaii.  That stuff is amazing!  Works really fast and very well.  I’m sure we’ll talk about that later as I see lots of it in my future.  Better sign off and go to bed before my angel wakes me once more.

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P90X – Day 1

I just finished my first “Chest and Back” workout in the P90X program. My muscles are crying inside. Or maybe it’s internal muscular bleeding that I feel sloshing around in there. I’m actually on a psudo-break since with this particular disc, there is the “Ab Ripper X” that comes after the initial Chest and Back. On this blogging break, I’m finishing off a bag of Jalapeño Cheetos because A) I just freaking earned it! and B) I’m getting all the stuff like this out of my house. Crystal sees to it that we eat pretty good around here and cheetos, etc. kind of submarine her efforts.

It’s not so much that I want to eat nails and get ultra buff like Ahnold here, but I figure that at 35, if I don’t do something to take care of myself physically, then something is doing to do it to me and that ain’t gonna fly.  I’m right at that point where I don’t look think I look bad, but know that if I don’t address my recent weight gain from the last year or so, that it could get out of hand.  I have noticed one thing though, I know that I’m still crazy in love with my wife, because whenever she comes up the stairs and I have my shirt off for whatever reason (shaving, changing, etc.), I still suck in my gut like I always have.  Maybe in 90 days or so, I won’t have to do that.  suh-WEET!

Also, if you don’t know her, my wife is a workout machine and is HOT!  Yes, she has good genes, but she gets up most mornings and until very recently, runs several miles.  She hasn’t given up the running, but she is about 3 weeks ahead of my on the P90X.  Ideally, we would have started together, but she wanted to get after it and I wasn’t going to start until I could commit to 90 consecutive days.  Now that I have a few things off my plate, today is Day 1.

In all seriousness, I did get a smack upside the head about how out if shape I am tonight.  I hadn’t purposely pushed my muscles into failing since high school and WOW!  Isaac woke up and I fed him just now and cradled him tighter than a football for fear that I would drop him.  Really.  He’s what, barely 10 lb. right now and it was all I could do to carry him down the stairs.  Ouch!

So, without further ado.  I better get back to my abs workout.  I have done this one once before when we were testing it out to see if we really wanted to do this.  It’s 15 little minutes, how hard could it be, right?  Buddy, it’s the longest 15 minutes of your life.  With average form, Crystal and I did this a couple of weeks ago and everything was cool, I was a little sore, but not bad…until I sneezed.  Then, I thought I was going to have to call 911 and ask them to send out Kansas City’s bravest to put out the fire.  That HURT something fierce!

So let’s go do it again.  Hooray!

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