It’s Time to Go to Siberia

This was week #204 since I started, and  5 weeks to next competition. This is only my second show, and while I don’t really have that ‘fear of the unknown’ going on, I still feel like a newb.  But this prep feels different.  I feel more “aware” than I did last summer.  I’m noticing things I didn’t notice before.  Or it really is different because the time of the year is different.   I know I was more excited last year.  I was more motivated to reach the goal.  Maybe my focus is off.

This was a good week for workouts.  My upper body work is heavier than ever.  My lower body work is still a lot – a lot – lighter.  The November injury to my hip has made that side so much weaker.  However, it doesn’t look like I’ve lost a lot of muscle.  Coach has done a good job with the leg program to work around the issues.

   

I am dealing with focus issues.  I love my gym, but it’s getting too small.   There are LOTS of competitors in this gym prepping for the same show.  There is too much “advice” being offered or gym gossip about how certain coaches do contest prep.   Every single day there are figure and bikini competitors standing around talking about cardio.  (Really?  How often can you talk about minutes spent on a machine?)    I suspect people are watching competitors to see how their prep is going.  Someone who doesn’t normally talk to me, interrupted my workout to ask which show I was going to do – again.  Pretty sure this same person has asked before.  It struck me weird.  Maybe it was innocent, but I got the impression that the intention was to check up on my coaching.  That pissed me off.   When I shared the story with Coach, he told me that this is “part of the game” and that I had to get used to it and shake it off.  Grrrr…  

My gym has been too busy, too.  It’s very annoying to have to walk around groups of 4 or 5 guys just standing around while one guy does a set.  The benches in the dumbbell area are too crowded.  Someone seems to be on equipment I need to use.  Grrrr…

I got a ticket for using my cell phone in the car this week, too.   I was at a red light and I plugged it in to charge.  The screen has a lock on it, so I had to tap the code to unlock it to check notifications.  That’s what I got a ticket for.  I wasn’t texting.  I wasn’t making a call.  And I wasn’t moving.  Grrrrr…

The end of the school year is coming up fast.  There is a TON of grading to do.  Not easy grading either.  Lots of distractions.  People want to have meetings to plan things for next year.  All kinds of interruptions to class time that need to be navigated as a teacher tries to get kids ready for final exams.   Kids who want to do anything BUT get ready for final exams.  Grrr…

And after I blogged about not knowing my “numbers”, Coach decided he wanted to check body fat.  Awesome. (Guess he doesn’t read this blog.)  Of course, it’s too high.  I’m 51 and the equations have that stupid “age adjustment” that always makes it too high.  Coach made a few negative noises and then tried to backtrack to reframe it.  It’s true, I’ve lost body fat on this cut, but it’s going slowly.  He says we’ll still make the show, and I believe that to be true, but I know he has a vested interest in me making this particular show since it’s a big local show.  Good PR for him.  Would he tell me the truth?  I’m about 90% sure he would and 100% sure that it doesn’t matter what he thinks – it matters what I think and do.  Grrr…

And at 5 weeks today, the diet just took a nasty turn.  That was going to happen anyway, regardless of the body fat number.  This is the point when I have very little variety in my food choices.  Grrr…

Not going to spell it out.  The last thing I need right now is some online stranger critiquing my diet.   Anyone who is really interested can contact my coach and hire him.   Sorry – but you gotta know that for every one innocent question, there are three emails asking for free meal plans or coaching.  Anyone with a fitness page knows exactly what I’m talking about.  

So this morning when I woke up, my inner fat chick’s voice was louder than usual, my inner kid who wants to eat pancakes for breakfast instead of chicken was whining “this is not fair”, my inner control freak is second guessing everything. And the cherry on the top of the day is that it’s a rest day – a much needed one with no cardio or anything.  Rest days are notorious for mental gymnastics even when the perception is that things are going well.  Grrrr…

I want to disengage from all of it – the gym, the inner dialogue, life drama  - all of it.

You know what I want to do?  I want to go into hiding in Siberia and train in a barn.  Like Rocky.

I have started to move my cardio work to the early mornings at school – bleachers and stairs are better anyway.  Better workouts and better for my focus.  Outside, just me and those bleachers.  At the gym, I’ll use the prowler.  I’ll add more weight on it now.  (Sadly, I’ve been grounded from tire flipping.  It’s not the best HIIT cardio and it does bruise up my arms.)

   

I do belong to another gym and I might start using it more often.  It has a nice cardio room for posing practice.  No one knows me there because I don’t use that gym much.  It’s more of a fitness corporate type of gym, so it won’t have some specialized equipment, but I can get my work done.  And coach is going out of town for a week, so I don’t have to navigate my workouts around his schedule.

And this morning, I’m writing this blog out on the patio with a cup of coffee.  Chillaxin.  Sorting out my negative thoughts, dealing with them, and putting them away by writing this post.

It’s a good time to go to Siberia, I think.  It would be awesome if I could just train in Siberia and show up at the show.  Sounds like a plan.  I can’t control anything except what I do.  Headphones on.  Sweats on.  Work my ass off.  Listen to Coach.  Eat what I’m supposed to eat.  Practice posing.  Order the suit.  This I can do.

Focus.

No Numbers

Colin has told me a couple of times to “do me”, so I’m taking his advice and moving forward. Feel like talking about something else today. Two blog posts in one day? Unheard of. Don’t care.

From 2009 to 2012, I took a lot of data. I watched my scale weight. I took measurements. I was a little obsessed with body fat percentage. I think I had my body fat checked with a DXA scan more than a few times. The last time I had it checked before the first show was July 2012. The scan read my body fat at 19%. The show was about two months away at that point and I was told that my target body fat was around 9%. There was no way I could get down to that number in the time I had left. Worry. Panic.

Coach had a great plan – ignore it. Focus only on the mirror.

I continued to watch my scale weight, but once we got about a week out, I stopped caring about that, too. I have no idea what I weighed on the day of the show. That seems to surprise many people. I don’t really see why. Didn’t matter. I was committed to do the show no matter what. There was no reason to know that number.

About a month after the show, I had the last DXA scan. Back around 20%. That’s when I decided once and for all that I don’t really give a shit about the numbers anymore. It doesn’t matter.

What matters is what I can see. What matters is that I keep making progress in the gym. What matters is how I present myself on stage. For the next show, I want to see improvement from the last one. That’s all.

While I’m not exactly excited about the quality of my posing, I am happy to see that my off season was productive. Especially since I’ve had a series of leg injuries since November.

And I am happy to report that I have absolutely NO IDEA what my body fat percentage is right now. Or my measurements. (I will have to take the measurements pretty soon to order my new suit.)

Drive-By’s

There are three draft posts sitting on my WordPress dashboard.  If you’re a blogger, you may have many drafts sitting there – I just can’t finish a post.  I’ve had a hard time lately.   I want to talk about what’s been going on, but I can’t for many reasons.  Can’t even discuss the reasons.

So instead of sharing my internal journey on my blog like I used to do, I thought I’d share my training or my contest diet stuff like I used to do.   But I can’t do that anymore, either. 

Anytime I say anything about anything, I get a lot of “Drive-By’s” and they are just a distraction.

Drive-By #1: Questions I don’t have time to answer.  

When I started my journey almost four years ago now, I paid for help.  And no, I couldn’t afford it.  But it was important to me so I found a way to do it.    I asked a ton of questions, but I asked the people I paid.   I also bought and read several books and I used the Internet to research.  There were periods of time when my “team” was in transition.  At that point, I asked questions from people I trusted, but I tried to be careful to not take up too much of their time.  (I hope they knew that.)  I understand why people are asking questions and I don’t mind answering quick, specific questions.   But there are so many who ask BIG questions.  Maybe they don’t know they are BIG questions?   Maybe they think they can’t afford a trainer?  Maybe they don’t know anyone they trust?  I don’t know.  It breaks my heart that I can’t spend the time being more helpful.  But it also frustrates me because, while I believe they are unhappy and want to change, their replies indicate that they aren’t really serious and they just wasted my time.   Asking a stranger a random question online is safe and non-committal.  I suspect that might be the issue for a few – ‘drive by’ commitment.  

Drive-By #2: Negative Comments (ie Facebook trolls)

Argumentative, contrary, and/or provocative comments.  I wouldn’t be surprised if someone wasn’t contemplating making one in the comments for this post until right at this moment when I mentioned it and now you will look really ignorant.  Lately, the one that makes me really nuts is something like…

“If you can’t handle it, why do you have a Facebook page?”

Oooo – that one burns my butt.  Here’s the reality – I’m a normal person who did this thing.  I blogged about it for personal accountability.  My long-distance friends and blogger buddies shared the experience with me and helped me stay on track.  I achieved my goal.  I shared my success. And then about 3,250 people jumped into the conversation.  I didn’t change.  I’m still me.  But now, I have to self-censor everything to avoid distraction.  I’m not a celebrity with ‘people’.  I’m not making my living in the fitness industry.  I have precious little time to be sharing what I’m doing and if it’s an unpleasant distraction, I share less.  I also am not fragile, nor are my feelings hurt.  I teach really hard math to teenagers for a living for almost 20 years – I’m made of pretty stern stuff.  I just get annoyed.  I used Facebook and the blog as fun distractions for my brain – a place to share and play.  But this junk going on recently has made it NOT fun.  So what’s the point?  Might as well keep things to myself.

So that’s where I’ve been.  Sharing less.

Maybe they are right.  I can’t handle it.  Nah – I can.  I just don’t want to.  I have a real life, with a real husband, a real job, and I’m training to compete again.  But I know that there are many people who are getting exactly what I had hoped they would get from my story – hope – so I don’t really want to quit writing and sharing.

Anyone who follows the page regularly knows all of this is working itself out.  Kind of came to a head last weekend, didn’t it?  LOL!  I pitched a fit on the page and invited people to leave.  A little over 20 did leave.  Then I got about that many new followers.   I will be using my administrative power to ban people when necessary.  And I’ll ignore questions if I don’t have time to answer.  Better yet – I hope the really smart people who follow my page might jump in and handle a few questions for me while I’m in the last 6 weeks of my prep??  (Hint, hint)  Hahahaha!

I really do appreciate the support and encouragement I’ve received from so many for so long.  It’s helped a lot.  We’ll just have to do a better job of tossing the rotten apples.

…and then I grew up

Reflecting today.  My thoughts are still along the lines of ‘self-sabotage’, but bigger than school or fitness.  Choices – good and bad.  Some people make bad choices, the rest of us see the train wreck about to happen, but the train’s engineer appears clueless that they can apply brakes.  We might call that person immature.  I was immature.  I grew up in a hurry.  Lost some things in the process, but I gained a lot, too.

THE LOOOOOONG BACKSTORY…

I don’t like revisiting my personal history.  Feels like I’m playing for sympathy, but I’m not.  I believe everyone has a bumpy ride of it, so my story is here just to establish a context.

There were circumstances beyond my control that forced me to leave college after three years.  I moved to a big city and got a job to support myself.  This is not a period of time I discuss very much.  I was a party girl in my 20′s in the 80′s.  I keep my secrets.  Too many bad decisions.  Some had permanent consequences.  Others just made my life harder for a period of time. Fairly predictable stuff for an adult kid of an alcoholic.  And a college-drop out.  A lot of pain, frustration,   and confusion during that time.  No blame – just background.

After about a decade of screwing up, I realized I needed to make a change.  I started school again in the fall of my 29th year.

And then Mom died.  She was only 56.  It was sudden and unexpected.  I lived in the big city about 200 miles away, so when I got the call from her ER doctor at 10 pm on a Tuesday night, I knew it was bad.  I knew they didn’t expect her to survive the night.  I didn’t have a car.  I had to take a bus home.  The next one left at 2 am, and when it pulled out of the big city terminal, I knew.  I felt it.  She was gone.  I didn’t make it.   The bus ride was about twice as long as it should have taken because of a Midwestern blizzard.  It felt longer.

My mother’s brother met me at the bus terminal.  The first thing he said to me was that Mom slipped away about 2 am, but since no family was there at the time, the doctor put her on life support.  He told me that I was supposed to go to the hospital and take her off.  (Yeah, wait – NO ONE WAS THERE??  That’s right.  My mother’s brothers went home.  No one stayed in the hospital with her while they waited for me and my brother to travel home!?!)  My brother and I decided together to take her off life support the next day.  I don’t remember if he stayed in the room – I think he did.  I know I did.

As the oldest kid, I had to handle things.  What made it complicated was that her mother died 3 months prior and she was the executor for Grandma’s estate.  So, this 29-yr-old party girl with almost no real responsibilities had two estates dumped in her lap.   Mom died at the end November 1991, just a couple weeks before final exams of my first semester back in college.   Only one professor agreed to give me an incomplete.  Everyone else told me I would fail the class if I didn’t show up for the final.   I didn’t have a car, so I used Mom’s car to make that 200+ mile commute to finish my classes while dealing with the estates back home.  When I called my boss from the hospital and asked for a few weeks off to handle my mother’s and grandmother’s affairs, my boss opted to let me go and hire another receptionist.  I had to use unemployment, food stamps, and heating assistance for a bit.  I also used student loans, part time and temp jobs to survive.  At one point, I had three part time jobs while in school.

I’m not going to say I’m grateful that these things happened, but I am grateful now for how it changed me.  I remember the feeling of it – I felt like I couldn’t breathe for about three years.  I was buried under so much poo – the insurmountable task of finishing those estates while I was grieving, trying to handle college, and not having a steady job.   

I grew up.

There was no time or money to play.  I had to work very, very hard all the time.  I reminded myself that every day only has 24 hours – meaning that I only had to survive a day at a time.   I became very serious.  I became more disciplined.  I lost all my party friends during that time because I wasn’t fun anymore.  I’m still not much fun.  I’m still pretty serious and disciplined.   I imagine that most people wouldn’t think that’s a good thing.

But I also learned how to accomplish BIG SCARY things.

THE POINT

Had my life followed the trajectory it was on, I wouldn’t have had the motivation or capacity to accomplish most of the things I’m proud of now.  I wouldn’t have met my husband.   I wouldn’t have become a teacher.   And today, I’m proud that I can flip a tire.  A little one in the “tire-flipping” world, but it’s still something I couldn’t do a year ago.

People have told me that I don’t know what it’s like to have hardship, be  poor, or be out of shape.  There is certainly more going on in my personal life that I write about – and some of it is… challenging.  If I have a life now that from the outside looks pretty good, it means I might have learned to overcome some of the poo life delivers.  I don’t pile up the poo and then worry about how tall the pile is getting.  Actually – I don’t acknowledge the poo exists.  I deal with it when I have to, but ignore it most of the time.  I must have learned how to do this when I was drowning in it.

Self-Sabotage

I’m always frustrated and fascinated when I see someone self-sabotage their own success.  Some say it’s because people don’ t want to work hard and want results with little to no work.  That’s probably true.  I suspect many people are working under the impression that if it’s hard to do, it must be impossible to do.  Or not the right way to do it.

Bull.

It’s called a work ethic.  It’s setting a goal and doing what you need to do to reach it, accepting that the time it takes and the work involved is what’s variable.  There are thousands of motivational quotes floating around about it.  But those quotes are just white noise if you haven’t already made the decision to let nothing stop you.  The quotes are great little reminders to keep your focus when you’re distracted by life, but a quote isn’t going to do much for you if you’re not open to being motivated.

Did you think I was talking about fitness?

It’s 4th quarter at school.  Kids are giving up.  They are weeks away from reaching their goals and achieving great things, but instead they are sitting down and quitting because they are tired and stressed out.  Happens every year.  Some students just won’t try.  Some students think they are ‘trying’ when they are really just ‘wishing’.  Some students work really hard, alone or with their friends instead of their teachers – they are working, but they aren’t working smart.

I talk with my fellow teachers and we all see this.  It doesn’t matter what the subject is that we teach.

And then I leave work and move into my other world – health and fitness.  I see and hear the same stuff.  I have a lot of friends who read my blogs, and I want to be really clear about this – I’m not talking about any one person in particular.   I hear and see this EVERYWHERE.  It’s really perplexing for me when I hear it at work about fitness.  I have heard teachers express frustration about students not following through for their own success, and then when the conversation topic switches, they start reciting a list of reasons why they cannot follow through for their own success with their health goals.  At the gym, I’ve been told directly by more than one person that the reason they cannot lose the weight is because it’s hard for people over X years old to do it.  (Usually X = an age younger than me.)  I just stand there and look at them.  When I’m feeling a little feisty  I ask them to follow me down the hall where my before/after picture hangs and ask, “Really?  Tell me more about how that’s impossible.”   When I get home and take an hour to relax and catch up on Facebook, what do I see?  People who at some point have asked for my help have  posted pictures of their drinking and eating escapades.  (I hide them from my feed.  I don’t have time for that.  I’m sure they have hidden me from their feeds by now, too.  All I do is check-in at the gym or post pics of my dogs.)

Oh, I do the same thing- there is a lot of stuff I don’t keep up with and I have a list of reasons why I don’t follow through.  (I’m sure there are a few of you reading this who are waiting on me to do something I said I would do.  It’s going to happen – I promise.  I really needed to write to clear my mental cache.)

It’s all about focus, I guess.  We succeed at the things we focus on and work on, right?  Simple.  Not easy.  Simple.

I find it interesting that the kid who tells me why he can’t succeed in my class sounds a lot like the adult who tells me they can’t succeed in reaching their health goals.

And on the days when hear this stuff all day, no matter where I’m at – well, that’s just frustrating.  I want to slap sense into people.  Instead, I focus on what I can control.  I ignore everybody and go lift.  So if it seems like I’ve disappeared for a few days, you’ll have an idea why.  I need to block out the noise and focus.  I have a goal.  9 weeks from today, actually.

Latest Interview

I’ve been following Lee Malaulau’s blog for sometime now.  He is an amazing young man of faith and a very inspirational fitness advocate.  I love his positive energy, and to be honest, I need it some days.  When Lee contacted me and asked if he could interview me for his blog, I was honored.  An easy “yes”!  I hope you like it.  And please explore his website, be inspired by his writings, and check out his Facebook pages.

http://www.leemalaulau.com/50yr-old-lifting-weights-and-spirits-interview-with-tammy-white/

If You Don’t Eat the Cake, the Birthday Doesn’t Count

Food psychology/sociology is fascinating. It wasn’t until I started bodybuilding that I really started to challenge my relationship with food. There is no biological reason for me to eat certain food for breakfast or a cake on my birthday. (It was in February.) Imagine that? I haven’t had birthday cake in…years. Maybe that’s why I look younger at 51 than I did at 47?? Birthdays don’t count if you don’t eat the cake? Well, that’s an interesting notion to ponder, isn’t it?

There is a psychological need to eat cheat food every so often, and there is some science out there to support it, but it’s not physically necessary for me to eat cheats. (I crave pizza and lasagna, but I don’t biologically need them. Many lifters do. They go low/no carb for longer periods than I do so they need a refeed.) I have DECADES of cheat meals that changed my body’s chemistry. Up to that point when my goal to become a healthy competitor became more important than food choices, losing weight was about deprivation. Now, I am a living nutrition science experiment.

I feel good. I don’t remember the last time I was sick. I heal quickly. Sure, I’m addicted to endorphins. Oh well. Side effects of that are a lot more pleasant than using sugar, processed foods, nicotine, or alcohol.

You have NO IDEA might have some idea how many times people say to me that they want similar results without giving up the substances that keep them from getting those results.

‘Wishing’ is easier than ‘doing’, I guess.