The Post-Apocalyptic Workout

Day 59: Fathead!

The end of week eight proves that the zombies aren't the only thing experiencing corpse bloat.

Previously:

This Week:

My weight is up but my measurements are (mostly) down.  I blame this on my parents, as they forced me to join them in Florida and feast on the innards of the bugs of the sea and consume many alcoholic libations.  Also, the whole point of having parents is that you have someone to blame things on.  This is why orphans are sad.

My husband said to me why don't you lie about your weight?  They're not gonna know.  But I feel like lying about that starts a slippery slope that ends in book deals and Oprah. 

Okay, I know, like that's gonna happen again.  Waitaminute...

Anyway, the only place I lie about my weight is at the DMV.

Moving on.

This the Final Week of the Couch-to-5K.  Spinning has mostly fallen to the wayside as has weight training as I gear my body to put one foot in front of the other for thirty minutes straight.  Sunday was my first outing, and at 8:00am I strapped on my running shoes and kissed Mr. Boy and Daisy the WonderDog goodbye and told them to shoot my ashes from a cannon if I didn't make it home alive. 

With the help of Google Maps, I had plotted a course to run outside.  We've had fabulous weather here in Los Angeles, and it only seems fitting that I start taking it to the streets, just like Michael McDonald.

FORTY minutes, people.  Forty mothereffing minutes.  In a mothereffing row.

A hair under three miles. 

Today I   left at 3pm to try it again.   However, I didn't follow my own advice on dumbassery  - that 2.5 pounds I gained over the past two weeks all must have gone to my head - as I hadn't eaten a damned thing (minus coffee) all day.  I bonked after 1.7 miles and walked the rest of the way but can I just have a moment to say I - the fat, slow kid who huffed and puffed through Hernia Hill - ran 1.7 miles in a fasted state.

Will try again tomorrow, sans dumbassery. 

And next Monday I start the next training phase of the PAW.  Stay tuned....

 

Day 19: Hunt the Wumpus

The other night Will and I sat down to watch Life After People, which he had thoughtfully Tivo'd for me.  As we watched as nature slowly destroyed what man had built, we kept remarking that it didn't seem all that horrible. Save for the fate of domesticated animals, a world without people was pretty damn decent.

But it was the footage of the dog locked in the house, the dogs scavenging the streets that got me.  Daisy wouldn't make it, I whispered to him under my breath. 

He glared at me.  She'll be fine, he insisted, shaking his head no but pointing at Daisy as if she could understand that we were discussing her impending fate.

The fate we were really discussing was my own.  A soft spot for animals will be my downfall, as it truly is  the creamy caramel center that lies beneath my hard candy shell.  I am a sucker for animals.  I'm no Timothy Treadwell, mind you, and if someone was being attacked by an animal, I'd grab the nearest shotgun. (Or shovel, since I neither own nor know how to operate a shotgun.)   

I understand the idea of the food chain, and I do eat meat.  Of course, as my liberal middle class guilt dictates, I buy organic cruelty-free meat that's put to death by virgins singing lullabies.  I know this makes me an annoying hypocrite, but if I had to kill and clean my food? I'd be a vegetarian. 

In a Post-Apocalyptic World, I don't think I can hunt.

It's not the act of killing that scares me.  It's the idea that animals seem innocent.  Hapless.  Minding their own business.  If I knew that Mr. Deer was a jerk who cut people off on the freeway on the way home from his job at the puppy-kicking factory, I'd be picking venison out of my teeth as I type this.

Of course, if you follow this logic down to the bitter end, you could come to the conclusion that Rev. Phelps will be the main course at my first Post-Apocalyptic Dinner Party.   

I could probably live with that.

Fish are exempt from this ruling.  Sure, Finding Nemo made me cry...and then crave fresh raw yellowtail.  Maybe because I saw my grandfather - the same grandfather who escaped from Russia during World War Two with his wife and his mother and his child and his dog (so the soft spot for animals is hereditary) - catching, killing, and gutting fish while I grew up.  He'd slice then in half lengthwise and put it in the smoker, head on and all.

In junior high when the other girls had square slices of greasy pizza or PB&J with mini cartons of milk, I'd pull out that coppery half-a -fish-carcass with the glassy, dead eye and tear out chunks of the smoky meat while most of them screamed in disgust.  I didn't care. It was good.

Survivorman caught a turtle in his Georgia Swampland episode last night.  He cleaned it off-camera, but as he roasted it over his small campfire he said that he didn't like killing things, and it wasn't something he practiced in his everyday life.  But sometimes it comes down to survival, and in those cases, you don't have much of a choice.  So maybe I'm not as pathetic as I think I am.   

Either way, I hope I never have to find out.

The Post-Apocalyptic Workout

What the hell is this?  I'll tell you what it is:

Of course, this little social experiment depends on a whole host of factors: time, money, a true lack of actual nightmare scenarios, that sort of thing.  It's not about fitting into a size two or filming myself eating bugs (not gonna happen) or going into full "Survivorman" mode.  It's about learning how to carry my own weight - figuratively and literally.  I've created a list that's linked under "the workout" there to your left.  It's by no means an exhaustive list, and I imagine I'll be adding to it substantially as the year wears on.

I've envisioned this as sort of an audience-participation project, so please share your ideas, your criticisms, your input, your knowledge, and if you want to take this journey with me, please do.