Another Good Result!

Yes, it’s true!

I lost another 5lbs!!!

Now I’m just hoping to carry on in the same way & also hoping to pick up some more sponsorship as well! I’m just short of £250.00 now so I’m nearly half way there but I still have a way to go.

If you remember, I am helping the hospice because I know how hard it is to find help and support for a child who has lost a parent so I particularly admire the work they do with bereaved children.

If you are thinking of sponsoring me at http://justgiving.com/tyvm but want to know where your money would go, here are just some examples of what the hospice could do with your help:

• £1 could pay for a hypodermic syringe.

• £3 could pay for lunch for a patient OR 250 medicine spoons OR a dressing pad OR a roll of bandages OR 15 patient identification wristbands.

• £5 could provide all meals for one day for a patient staying in our Inpatient Unit – so breakfast, lunch, dinner and any snacks!

• £20 could fund an hour’s support for a child coping with losing a loved one, with one of our highly trained Children’s Support Workers.

• £38 could run our minibus to transport patients from home to the Hospice for one week.

• £77 could help our volunteer gardeners to maintain our beautiful landscaped gardens which are loved by patients and their families.

• £85 could provide an hour of nursing care on our Inpatient Unit, which operates 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

• £100 could buy a day’s shift for one of our specialist home care nurses.

Remember – the hospice provide all of their services completely free of charge and they only receive about 18% of the funding they need from the NHS so they rely on super stars like you to find the rest of the money.

Please help if you can – thank you!

 

I don’t do running!

I am not very good at this blog-keeping am I? Apologies for not updating this sooner. I do have an excuse though as I have been working very hard – and then last week I wasn’t very well.

Still, I’m all better now – or I was until my personal trainer session today! Twenty minutes of treadmill to start – and he made me run! Seriously!!!! Everyone knows I don’t do running – but he made me run. Ok, it was only for a very short amount of time &, to be fair, he ran as well but still, me & running? I don’t think so!!!!!

Then it was 5km on the rowing machine. Deceptively easy to begin with, this always suddenly catches up with me & today was no different. At times, I really did feel like I simply couldn’t do any more of it but, if Will says I have to, I do, so I did.

Of course this probably all sounds really pathetic to you (whoever you may be :)) & you’re right – it is. Just a bit of running & a 5km row! I bet you’d hardly break a sweat, I doubt many people would.

However, I am not most people – I’m Embarrassingly Unfit Woman! (one of Stan Lee’s lesser-known works – I got my super-hyperventilating power from prolonged exposure to chocolate & sitting down :))

No, in all seriousness, it actually wasn’t that bad – I certainly felt better than I did after the last few sessions so that’s great!

Now I feel – well, it’s hard to describe. When I first left the sportscentre I felt ok – tired but ok. However, within a few minutes I started to feel very hot, and very heavy – like my limbs were made of lead. Then my nose started to hurt, the same way it does if you get water in it when you’re swimming – that sort of burning feeling. Now I keep sneezing & my head feels like cotton wool.

It really is most peculiar. Still, it’s probably just the warmer weather, or because I’m more tired than usual….

…or maybe my Mum was right all along. Maybe I really am allergic to exercise!? 🙂

Bye for now!

…turns out I needn’t have worried!

In fact, I had cause to celebrate because…

I lost 5lbs!!!

5lbs!!! I was so happy I could have jumped for joy! (& probably would have done if my knees weren’t still a bit sore!)

It was such a great feeling! It really was – I hadn’t realised quite how worried I had been about not doing as well as everyone else but now I knew because, suddenly I just felt so totally relieved and so completely and utterly happy!

It was also made even better because my friend, Emma, also lost this week. It was brilliant as she’s had a couple of weeks of not losing despite doing everything right and more and then this week she lost 7lbs! I am so happy for her!

So now I am happily heading in to week five with another 5lbs gone and with a very big smile on my face! Maybe you could sponsor me to keep up the good work?

Remember, it is for a truly wonderful cause!

I have my next PT session on Friday afternoon & on Friday night we have a BodyCombat class which sounds really good. I just hope Will lets me keep some strength left in my legs for it. (I’ll let you know as soon as I recovered enough to sit up and type.)

Spinning, jumping, rowing, swimming, worrying…

So on to week four… my fresh start!

Well we had group spinning on Friday and it was hard work! Definitely confirmed my belief that I would not be able to handle a full-on spinning class at this stage of my unfitness! At one point Janet got us doing ‘jumps’! Now I had no idea how you would do that on a spinning bike but it turns out what you do is slide forward off the saddle, peddle for a short time, then slide back on again. So you learn something new every day.

Funny thing is, when I told my daughter this, she sighed wearily and said “so it’s exactly like jumping on a real bike then Mum?”- and I suddenly realised it wasn’t just spinning bikes, I had no idea how to jump on a real bike either! Turns out, now I think about it, that despite riding bikes everywhere as a child, I’ve never even attempted to jump anything on one! Odd!

Anyway, we did the jumps but my goodness it wasn’t easy. It hurt – and not in the normal sense – no dull ache or stabbing pain this, no, This pain made it feel like my knees were on fire! As if they were actually burning every time we did it! Bizarre.

It was a good workout though and it did make me feel positive about the week ahead. (despite the fact I ended up with the theme from Absolutely Fabulous stuck in my head for days, during which time I somehow changed the lyrics from “wheels on fire” to “knees on fire”…)

Moving on…

My next serious exercise came on Monday in the form of a personal training session with Will. Now he’s a great trainer and a really nice person but, half way through that hour, I was wishing I’d never met him. After the treadmill and the chest press he set me 5000m on the rower in increasing speed intervals! It was really, really hard work & I honestly did think at one point that I wasn’t going to be able to carry on! Of course that reminded me of the contestants on the Biggest Loser on television as it was probably the first time I’ve been near to getting all angry and crying or being sick the way they always seem to. So I tried to just grit my teeth and carry on and I managed the whole lot in the end but I did feel like I couldn’t walk afterwards because my legs were all weak and shaky. It’s embarrassing how unfit I am!

On Tuesday I went swimming with my daughter and then walked a long way with lots of heavy shopping and the wet swimming stuff afterwards so my arms were really hurting again by the next day. Not as bad as the T-Rex incident, thank goodness, but still pretty achey.

On Wednesday I was supposed to go to Zumba gold but I ended up having to cancel it to wait in for the gas man again (a long and very boring story believe me!) so I spent all day worrying about the weigh-in and feeling like I hadn’t done enough. I was absolutely dreading getting on those scales and seeing the same result as the week before or worse!

So, by the time seven o’clock finally rolled around & I was waiting in line to be weighed, I had been worrying myself sick all day & I really had no idea what to expect….

 

From tortoise to T-Rex in one bad week

Another quick update about my progress – filling you in on how I was after the spinning class, my personal trainer session and our group circuits class on the Wednesday night (after the second weigh-in).

To be honest, I wasn’t feeling great – no, that’s not strictly true, I was feeling fine – except that I woke up to find my arms were gone! Ok, obviously my arms weren’t actually gone, I still had arms, it just felt like they were gone – like they’d been stolen in the night and replaced with the arms of a T-rex!

It wasn’t just that they hurt, I expected them to hurt, this was something else! I actually couldn’t straighten my arms! They felt like they’d frozen at the elbow and I spent the next three days walking around with my arms bent and having to lean forward to pick things up that were right in front of me! It was not at all easy. Seriously. It was hard. Put it this way – if Marc Bolan had been a T-Rex instead of in T-Rex he would not have been able to play the guitar!

Anyway, my daughter, although genuinely sympathetic, could not help finding it (or rather me) very funny and she kept showing me cartoons like these which did make me laugh – when I wasn’t wincing in pain.

However, there was a more serious side to this problem because it did prevent me from exercising as much as I wanted to over those next few days and, sadly, this was reflected at the next weigh-in. That lack of exercise combined with the Easter effect – when I wasn’t able to stick to my diet as strictly as I wanted to because I wasn’t the person cooking – meant that I didn’t lose any weight!

I was basically expecting this but I was still very annoyed. However, I told myself there was only one thing to do. Start again and use that feeling – turn it in to more effort and extra exercise from that point onwards and make sure that never happened again!

So now, at the start of week four, with my arm-extending ability fully restored, that is what I’ve set out to do!

The Second Weigh-in!

I just realised that I still haven’t told you how I got on at my second weigh-in on the 27th March! So here goes…Drum roll please…..

I lost 3 and a half pounds!!!

Ok, still not earth shattering, but better and better is always good!

Quite a bit of exercise went in to that total though!

Firstly there was the spinning class I posted about previously, secondly, a session with my personal trainer – where I worked muscles I didn’t know I had – and thirdly, walking back and forth to the sportscentre to get to each session.

Now I am aware that might not sound like much but, when you’ve done next to nothing like I have for as long as I have, it certainly feels like a lot believe me!

Anyway, onwards and upwards from now on – or, hopefully more accurately, onwards and downwards weight-wise.

Well, that’s the plan anyway so fingers crossed for the future!

 

Nice & Easy Spinning… surely that’s an oxymoron?!

That’s what I thought when I first saw the class listed – that surely there was no way spinning could ever be described as easy or nice! As concepts they just seemed the complete opposite of each other! I mean, I’d never done any spinning, but I’d seen them in the spin studio working harder than seemed humanly possible and nothing about it had ever looked in any way nice or easy to me!

However, I would soon find out for sure because, on Wednesday morning, I went to my first ever spinning class “Nice & Easy Spinning”. I booked that one because you have to take either one of those or a beginner class before you can join a ‘normal’ class. However, I freely admit that I was both relieved and terrified by that fact. Relieved, because I very much doubted I could cope with any class more strenuous than that, and terrified in case I couldn’t even manage to do that one. I mean, I was pretty sure that what they considered “nice & easy” would not feel anything like “nice & easy” to me 🙂

Anyway, I swallowed my fears & went &, to my surprise (even though it was hard work for me) I actually really enjoyed it!

The instructor chose some good music which always helps – music really lifts my mood whatever I’m doing – & the class really wasn’t too hard. Yes, it was hard, but it wasn’t so bad that it made me want to give up or stop so that was excellent! I was really pleased!

Weirdly, it wasn’t even my legs that hurt afterwards – it was my wrists. Not sure if I wasn’t sitting quite right, or if I just have weak wrists but they were really killing me for a lot of the class! Hope that doesn’t happen next time.

Yes, you heard me right, there is going to be a next time – at least two next times in fact. (because it really was that enjoyable :)) Firstly this Friday evening – our group exercise class is spinning this week – and then again, for me, next Wednesday as I have booked another “Nice & easy” class like my first one & I’m really looking forward to it!

So, as it turns out, Nice & Easy Spinning is not really an oxymoron – I mean, don’t get me wrong, a more accurate name for me to give it right now would be Fun & Hard Spinning – and I was right, there is no way I could manage a full on spinning class yet, (or possibly ever :)) – but I did get through this one relatively unscathed & that’s a good enough start for me 🙂

Please visit my JustGiving page to sponsor me!

Thank you!

A quick catch up…

Ok, as I’ve let this slip again I’ll just give you a brief synopsis of the first two weeks of the challenge! We had our first group exercise class (it was legs, bums & tums that time) and our first circuits class in the gym and I actually enjoyed them both! I also did my gym induction with my personal trainer – Will – and, despite my (not so) secret fear that I would totally embarrass myself, I have been back and used the gym again since then (to attempt the program he worked out for me), so it obviously didn’t scare me as much as I thought it would 🙂

Which reminds me, I do want to mention all the people who are involved with this challenge because they are all really lovely and supportive & they are all volunteering their time for free!

Harriet from the hospice, Will my Personal Trainer and Janet the group exercise manager at Sportspace (to name just a few) are all putting in a lot of effort and energy helping & training myself and all the other participants so we can lose weight & so the hospice can keep doing the wonderful work they do! Their dedication, to us and to the hospice, is inspiring and they deserve a huge thank you – so thank you, all of you.

The same goes for all the other participants too! I have to say I was actually more nervous and worried about meeting them than I was about doing all the exercise! Don’t know why really, mostly my own insecurity about myself but probably also because I don’t really get out and see people much anymore so I worry about it. Anyway, I needn’t have worried. Everyone is really friendly & really supportive of each other & there is always a great atmosphere when we all get together – it makes the whole thing fun – even the exercise – & I never thought I’d say that 🙂

Anyway, as I said, this was just a brief update to cover everything that happened up to the morning 0f Wednesday 27th so, that being done, I’ll sign off for now and fill you in on the rest in my next post.

Remember! You can sponsor me at any time via

my JustGiving page

Please give as much as you can for this amazing cause!

Maybe I’m a tortoise?

Okay, I’m back finally! Sorry for not updating this sooner but, typically, things ended up going a bit pear-shaped over the last week and a half! (though pear-shaped is probably not the best description to use in this case)

Anyway, long story short, I ended up getting a blooming awful cold and a cough that would not go away and which made it nigh on impossible for me to actually do anything for a good few days!

Still, at last week’s weigh-in, I had managed to lose 2 and a half pounds despite not actually being able to get going with the exercising as much as I had planned.

So, Yay! (I think…)

No, to be honest, I am really disappointed that it wasn’t more but, as my Mum pointed out, it is still more than a bag of sugar & if you had to carry a bag of sugar with you everywhere it would soon feel pretty heavy!

So – even though I do have my doubts (and worries and fears) about this week as well seeing as I missed so much exercise time while I was coughing myself silly – I am trying to think of it like that & stay positive! Especially as I’m back to feeling well again now & I can finally really get going with lots of exercise as originally planned.

Yes, my start has been slow compared to the brilliant achievements of the other participants (& a huge well done to all of you by the way, you really deserve it :)) but, hopefully, I’ll do better from now on.

Plus, you never know, I might just surprise everyone. After all, with a start as slow as mine, I could easily be mistaken for a tortoise – and we all know how his race ended 😉

Take care & bye for now,

g.x

Remember!

I’m doing all this for a REALLY good cause!

So PLEASE do visit my JustGiving page and sponsor me!

Or sponsor me by text message! (the details are on this page)

Any amount you can afford will help the hospice & make a huge difference in the lives of the patients & families they care for!

Thank you!

You can also donate by text message!

Donating online via my Just Giving page is quick, safe & easy – but you can also donate quickly, safely & easily using your mobile phone!

The code TYVM83 is unique to my Just Giving page so you can be sure your money is going to right place!

So why not text me your donation today – and then pass on the code to your friends, family and colleagues – every donation helps & will be gratefully received!