Geekery is fun.

Thanks to being able to bask in the example of other runners and crazy weight-lifting gals, both live (in the case of the running only, granted) and blogwise ::blows kisses at you lovely women::, I've put myself back into slow-improvement mode, determined to start catching up. Hooray for positive role models! I've suddenly got people to emulate and goals in mind beyond "slog through this damn routine again".

When it comes to running, I want to go faster in the 5K-- or at least be able to hang on to that 28:44 without dying from it next time-- and to start building up my distance abilities at some point. (Must ponder how; my running time in the mornings is limited to about 40 minutes.) Weight-wise, I have taken the first step into a larger world: I co-opted my Hub's set of real dumbbells, the kind with plates that you take off and put on. (Sad to say, before this I was just using my wee 5-lb foam-covered girly weights.) I'm determined to move as many exercises onto the 7.5-lb weights as possible this week, and to up the number of sets I do for ab work. If I'm gonna do this, then dammit, I'm gonna stop farting around on it and get some improvement.

For all of this, I built a spreadsheet! Okay, technically I had the spreadsheet built a few weeks ago, and I've been tweaking it a little every once in a while, but this morning I gave it a full makeover. Now I'm not only tracking how many sets I do of each exercise, but how many reps in each set and how much weight. Still tracking distance for the runs; I need to do a little work on adding a column calculating my average pace, but I've got an idea for that. Then I set up an Average section for each exercise.

I've already noticed that I have a distinct slacker pattern on Thursdays. My runs on Thursdays apparently always suck. Mental note: stay aware of this and get the hell over myself on Thursday mornings.

Anyway. Raaaawr! I'm feeling ambitious.

Food-wise, I discovered yesterday that pretty much the only thing keeping my inner Cartman in check was a lack of available funds and the fact that I would have had to go somewhere in order to get the food. When I stupidly lifted my Never Go Into The Employee Kitchen rule yesterday afternoon (a combination of "hey, it's the Day Off" and "hey, I was already in here for the free lunch"... very very stupid), I ended up heading back there on every occasion I could think of yesterday afternoon and eating a LOT of leftover crap.

Stupid. It was my choice, and I made it because the food was free, because it was there on a limited-time basis, because I could justify it via the Day Off, and because I apparently miss the freedom of just cutting loose and running mad. Oh, my God, was I stuffed and ill by the time we went home.

(The new rule: the doorway to the employee kitchen is a mystical gateway that I cannot access alone. Only when I am taken there for meetings or employee gatherings may I enter; otherwise I am barred and forbidden. So just because I've been there once doesn't mean I get to go back. Oy.)

Did that mean I called off the fun for the evening? Nope. We just didn't go out to eat. Apparently my Hub had loaded up on free food himself, so neither of us were hungry. However, once I no longer felt sick, we had a little dinner, and then we decided to go buy some drink mixers (diet soda for me, regular for El Hubbo). It was later than we realized and the little shop around the corner was closed, so we ended up walking all the way down to the grocery store.

Where we promptly purchased soda, a frozen pizza, two pints of Ben & Jerry's, and a bag of those buffalo-wing-flavored pretzel chunks. Definitely cheaper than going out to eat, but... oy. I drank R&DDPs (rum and diet Dr Pepper), ate most of my pint of ice cream, a piece of pizza, and a bunch of the pretzel chunks.

Woke up this morning and thought "Okay, the only way yesterday will improve my lot in life is if I learn lessons from it. Right now the lesson learned is how to deal with the morning after." I went out and grabbed a roll of tape and swathed the pretzel bag and "my" pint of ice cream in tape. I suspect that half the reason I run mad with these things is that I don't get to save them for myself for next week-- what I don't eat, my Hub will. So if I preserve them for myself in such a way that I can't access it during the week between... theoretically, that'll relax that part of my brain. We'll see.

I ate breakfast. I've pretty much eaten nothing since. My body is still stunned and wondering what the hell I did to it yesterday.

On the up side, had a hell of a good run. I'm still not up to busting out 10-minute miles on a regular day, but I figured out a pattern-- kick up the speed by quite a lot in the last minute of every 5-minute chunk, then drop the speed back down for the next four minutes... except that the "slower" speed is faster than the last 4 minutes' worth of "slow". It tricks my mind into believing that I'm going slower than I am, rather than letting me whine about "oh, it's too fast, I can't keep this up for five minutes, go back to the last setting". My mind is a tricky thing; it seems determined to fool me into thinking that I'm more pitiful than I really am. I have to sneak past my own laziness.

I think I can, though. I'm pretty sure I can.

In other news, it looks like my next big project will be getting my work life together. I'm on a slow crawl to get my shit together, both in terms of my lifestyle and of my resume (not to mention my mental approach to work), to move on to a better-paying job. Slowly, slowly putting together a plan to deal with transportation, with education, with how this would affect us in terms of no longer working at the same company, yadda yadda yadda. There are a million things I want to be comfortable with before I start looking. It's going, though.