Another First

Posted on by Jordan

We got our first Amazon order that came with its own shipping pallet

 

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Side note, you can see that our garage isn’t really organized yet… not even close

 

Back on topic, we now have a treadmill! It ended up being the heaviest thing I have had to lift in the entire moving process, but last night Heather and I managed to get it down into the basement and setup.

It would be difficult to overstate how happy Heather was to have a treadmill… walking is a big part of her stress management process, and being able to do that while staying close to Hannah is a big deal.

-Jordan

Workouts 2014 Edition, Or Perhaps A Retrospective

Posted on by Jordan

It has been roughly a year now that I have been doing the “You Are Your Own Gym” workouts, as mentioned in a prior post. I can’t say that I have really been doing the workouts as much as borrowing the lift ideas and doing parts of the workouts. His full program is intense! I find that I cannot push myself that hard and keep doing the workout, sadly.

On the bright side, doing a somewhat relaxed version has allowed me to consistently get three to four workouts in a week. This has been enough to at least let me maintain my weight, and stay in something that resembles “in shape.” I sometimes worried about my joints using this approach, but excepting some muscle soreness, it has been surprisingly easy on my body over the past year.

We had one of those random mid-winter nice days a week or so back, and I thought it would be a great idea to go for a run. It turns out my knees still don’t really like that. I guess it was almost two years ago that I was running regularly, and I wasn’t having too much in the way of knee pain most of the time then. Maybe I would need to work back up to that, because just doing an out of the blue run caused several days worth of pain.

All of that is to say that I am really glad to have found something that is: low impact, practical within the confines of parenting a one-year-old, and something I can keep doing day in and day out.

A year in, and I don’t even slightly resemble the guy on the cover though, so perhaps there is still room for improvement 🙂

 

-Jordan

Workouts

Posted on by Jordan

Subtitle: Yes we still do them!

The addition of Hannah into our lives has…. complicated getting work outs in, but Heather and I have managed to sneak in at least a little exercise despite the rather demanding schedule imposed by an infant.

Heather continues to take advantage of the treadmill in our building. I won’t say much beyond that it’s what she has been doing for a long time and covers all the bases of being enjoyable, effective stress control, and producing results.

Last winter I tried using the elliptical trainer as a way to be nicer to my knees. I never felt like I was able to challenge myself enough, and I really don’t like staring into a TV during my workout. I decided to try a more strength training oriented approach this winter. Pre-Hannah I was just doing kind of a random collection of body-weight lifts, and the occasional free-weight session. It worked ok, but I would not consider it a great success.

After the initial craziness of Hannah’s arrival I wanted to take a more structured, and hopefully efficient approach, primarily using the book “You Are Your Own Gym.” I am now a couple of months into the “basic” program, and fairly happy with it. I can’t say that I have really lost weight, but I have gotten stronger, and considering how tricky it is to sneak in workouts some days I will have to be happy with that for now.

Someday it will warm up (not today, May second and it’s been snowing for 14 solid hours!)  and I will incorporate running again, but I do think it’s noteworthy that I am over two months into a challenging workout program and haven’t had to skip a single day for knee problems or other injuries. I haven’t ever had that kind of consistency with running.

I have been really impressed that using minimal equipment, just a big dowel to place across a doorway or span over two stools and lots of different body weight lifts (think push-ups) even two months in I am still finding the workouts challenging! The downside is I probably need a pull-up bar at some point, and I have needed to adjust the occasional workout to remove jumping oriented lifts. Someday we won’t live on the 3rd floor and I can re-introduce those 🙂

-Jordan

Fitness Tools, Spring 2012

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Heather and I are always looking for ways to stay active. Also, as spring starts to get underway, loosing some of the “lay under a blanket and eat comfort food” weight factors into out goals.

Heather got a tip from a coworker about My Fitness Pall and has whole hardheartedly started using it. I can’t necessarily explain what it has that other food-tracking sites don’t except to say that it perfectly fits what she was looking for. One feature I haven’t seen in the tools I played with last spring is that it automatically adds your workouts into your daily caloric budget, so your food log takes into account that you spent an hour on the treadmill.

Now that we have gone most of a month using the site to track both eating and cardio workouts we have learned a few things.

  • I need a lot more calories than Heather
  • Having more detailed information really allowed us to make small changes that had a big impact
  • Heather is happier if she gets a workout in, if for no other reason than to increase her caloric budget a little
  • We didn’t realize how many little flaws there were in our generic “try to eat healthy” approach we had

On the first point; it has been a sometimes frustrating transition as meal planning gets a lot more complicated when you have to account for different needs. We have managed fairly well, but it’s been an adjustment.

An easy example of changes we made is breakfast. With the realization that I should probably be eating more, and knowing the whole “it’s better to eat a big breakfast” thing, I more or less doubled the size of the breakfast I eat. It’s been surprising to not have the constant feeling of hunger generally have transitioning into a fitness kick like I am on right now.

Along with the daily workouts, Heather has started working out in the mornings without me. The fact that I am not a morning person hasn’t helped our prior workout plans, and making that change seems to leave everyone happier. (I have been told repeatedly that I am not very nice before 7am… can’t explain it, but it must be true)

Things we didn’t know were quite so bad: Bread, pasta, potatoes. I sort of thought we had that under control by switching to whole wheat. Turns out those guys are surprisingly calorie dense. It isn’t that we don’t eat them now, it’s just that we have to be honest about how fast that stuff adds up. Unexpected good news? Bacon isn’t really that bad! I brought back Saturday morning bacon, and have really enjoyed the discovery 🙂

 

My only disappointment with My Fitness Pall is that they don’t really do anything with strength training. I started out the year with the resolution that I would get two days of strength training in every week. The site does allow you to record things you do, but with no feedback, it almost felt like they were discouraging you from doing it.

About that time, my sister mentioned a site called Fitocracy. It’s a site that does two things: publishes your workouts, and gives points for doing things, with levels, badges, and achievements. The latter half of that pair is very video game inspired, but that happens to be something that I can get into.

I wasn’t sure how much I would get into it, but after two weeks, it has already motivated me to take my strength training beyond what I could do at home (push-ups, lunges, sit-ups) and into lifting actual weights again.

Hopefully this all translates into some great results. I guess we will know in a few months!

-Jordan

 

Small tangent that I wanted to mention, but didn’t really fit above: I used a food-tracking website in conjunction with the cardio kickboxing thing we did last year. It didn’t provide any guidance as to how many calories I should be eating, and my ‘coach’ (a well meaning volunteer) didn’t really ether. Long story short, apparently doing an hour of high-intensity workout on 1400 calories a day doesn’t actually produce good long term results when your my size. (for reference, even without a workout, MFP figures I can eat 2100 a day and still loose weight)

 

The Slog

Posted on by Jordan

It’s that time of year again… Christmas is over and the weather just keeps getting colder. It makes it hard to want to do anything except crawl under a blanket on the couch and eat warm carbs.

This isn’t the first winter I have seen though. Heather and I are, distressingly, starting to establish a pattern to deal with this time of year. The initial plan had been to put our wedding anniversary provide some diversion in the midst of the post-Christmas blues. While that helps, we find ourselves feeling way too lethargic by about January 5th.

So for the third year running, we have embarked on a fitness challenge! I shouldn’t take too much credit, Heather is the driving force behind our decision every year… Something I am incredibly grateful for, considering I still lack the drive to start one of these despite the demonstrable benefits they have provided in my life.

That being said, going to the gym when there is an inch of slush in the parking lot and the air temperature is one degree is no fun at all. Also, it seems we aren’t the only people to have decided now is the perfect time to hit the gym, so it’s five times as crowded now as it was a month ago.

All the same, we are working out once again! I never expect the incredible soreness that comes with these things… I guess that means we are making progress 🙂

On the topic of being more healthy, I saw a recipe for pumpkin sloppy joes (aka Sloppy Jacks)

I won’t re-post it here, as you can head over to Cheap Healthy Good for the recipe

I knew I had to try it though, because as a rule Heather loves anything that involves pumpkin!

We didn’t have ground turkey on hand, so I just used beef. The results were… remarkably sloppy-joe-like. I suppose you would be able to see the difference if you had my filling next to a ‘normal’ batch, but I was surprised how unremarkable it was. It was also shocking to find that we couldn’t really taste the pumpkin in the sandwiches.

In keeping with the aforementioned rule, Heather loved them. I think we may have another quick meal on her list of favorites.

(no picture included, because they looked just like sloppy-joes)

-Jordan

Spring Cleaning

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It is still spring right?

Because we just got around to the first major cleaning this apartment has ever had.

We weren’t exactly living squalor, but somehow being on the run most of the time had gradually let us get farther and farther behind in general upkeep. Much of the past weekend was spent cleaning, with the additional touch here and there after work, things are starting to look darn good around here!

We have a second bedroom. As much as we tried to avoid it, that room became the “everything room” catching odds and ends from the first day we moved in. It has a bed in it, and I think in prior post I may have implied that it was just minutes from being ready to host a guest. Well, it may have taken a little more than just minutes, and it might not be 100% ready yet….

One of the things we discovered while attacking the remaining tasks in said room: Not only were things un-dealt with since the move in there, the prickly disagreement that contributed to them being dropped in there instead of being dealt with properly somehow was still attached! That isn’t to say we had a horrible weekend full of not getting along, it just means we discovered that many of the tasks were far more complicated than we could have ever imagined. Heather and I can both be rather… insistent when we know how something should be done. Sad to think we can discover that much when just cleaning a room, I am sure we will get to put everything we learn now to use a few times throughout the coming years.

In a less personal note, I cleaned out the freezer and found some frozen shrimp. The first half of the bag I had used to make this salad: Asparagus and Shrimp Salad. I forgot to take any pictures, but mine ended up looking about the same. Sadly neither Heather nor I were particularly taken with it, so I wanted to try something else with the remaining shrimp. We also had a number or cups of Greek Yogurt pushing their expiration date, so I pulled together a remarkably convincing Shrimp Alfredo that was at least close to healthy enough to be eating on our last week of this workout challenge! 🙂

Check back soon for my chance to work through the backlog of recipes that weren’t healthy enough for the challenge 😉

Also, I have no idea how this is turning into a 40/60 split between things we do and things I cook… but I guess it gives me something to talk about.

-Jordan

Lincoln Half-Marathon

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So there is a missing weekend, but I realize the longer I put off posing the more I feel obligated to do some sort of super-post that I don’t have time for right now. That train of though leads to no updates for two weeks!

Starting off the weekend, Friday night Heather and I had the rare opportunity to see one of my cousins compete in a gymnastics event! She qualified for the Western Nationals, an even that was held this year in Des Moines. My grandparents, sister, and an aunt all came into town as well, so we had a pretty good crew in the stands.

Saturday night we hit the road for Lincoln, planning just enough time to arrive at my sisters house and go straight to sleep. The sleep was important though, as we had to start rather early Sunday morning for the marathon.

Heather’s sister, and a cousin were both planning to run the half marathon! I had toyed with the idea of trying to at least run part of the time. My knee has actually held up pretty well during the cardio-kickboxing program we are wrapping up, but I can’t say as it’s 100% these days. I decided my goal would be to just keep up with Heather!

A few points:

  • Thirteen miles is a long ways!
  • We were not the last people to finish
  • At one point we even broke a sweat… kind of
  • My feet and calves are still sore

Although at the time, I may have felt that we were just out for a rather long and guided stroll… by the time we wrapped up the last few miles I was really feeling it. To put it mildly Heather and I have HUGE respect for anybody able to finish one of these!

-Jordan

Three Weeks Down!

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Today marks the end of three weeks in the Goals In Motion ‘Challenge’.

That leaves six to go, and I am counting 🙂

The interesting thing is that I rather enjoy the workouts, I just don’t like getting up that early, or what getting up that early does to my evenings. In case I haven’t mentioned it, we get up at 4:20 in order to make the 5:15 workout.

Beyond the changes to our sleep schedule, our eating changes have been more significant than expected. Heather and I did another challenge a while back that included an eating program, although it was self moderated. With the current program we have an assigned coach / mentor. She has been incredibly helpful! We already had the basic principals from before, but she has really helped us fine-tune it. One of the tools we have been using is a website called “The Daily Plate,” that provides a nice nutritional tracking tool.  To be honest, the site is clunky and less than user friendly, but it’s free and gives us and our coaches access to the information we want.

Because of our nutritional goals, I have been really looking for new things to cook. I tried a few noteworthy things over the past few weeks.

First up was “Stickless Shish-Kabab“only I cut back the oil in the marinade, and made it with chicken.

I discovered a number of things that were somewhat exciting in the process. First up is the fact that our oven, although lacking the traditional gas oven broiler pan, has broiler settings to ether turn the top or bottom heating element on constantly. This gave me a lot more control when broiling than I have ever had with an oven before. The option to just turn on the bottom element will come in to play once pizza is back on the menu. The second thing I discovered is that the stores have yellow squash in stock, and that Heather and I both rather like them grilled. We have grilled them a few times already, after ‘discovering’ them in this recipe.

The second thing I tried was “Whole Wheat Pasta with Asparagus.” I don’t really think I set out to modify this recipe, I just didn’t quite have the right stuff on hand. I don’t know if the kind of sausage called for was what I used, but it was really hard to skin, so I just chopped it up and did slices instead. Beyond that change I think it was basically what the recipe called for. The results were really good, and I think I may have converted Heather to liking Asparagus.

The final new item we tried was a notable strikeout. After our success with grilled squash, we were eager to try to expand our arsenal of grilling options, so we thought eggplant might be a good thing to try. Normally I would have avoided eggplant, but i figured we were on such a role with new things that it might be really good. (pictured here, hot off the grill)

It wasn’t terrible… but it wasn’t great ether. I know there are recipes that dress eggplant up a lot more, and I think we may need to look into those. Heather mentioned having really liked eggplant in Spain, but that it was breaded, fried, and drizzled with honey. Hopefully we won’t have to go to those lengths, but as it stands now eggplant isn’t on our veggie good-list.

-Jordan

Kicking Off A New Chapter

Posted on by Jordan

I wasn’t actually going for the dumb pun when I wrote that title, but I seem to have made one.  The new chapter, if you will, for Heather and I is doing a fitness challenge with a cardio-kickboxing class.

Heather and I saw amazing success when doing the “Body For Life” program, but we have found that we were only able to stay dedicated to going to the gym every morning when we were meeting each other there. The Atlantic drive, sucked all our free time and energy out of fall, and the cold snowy winter really made working out hard. Both of those have left us feeling lethargic and unmotivated to jump into spring and summer.

We have decided to counter that aggressively! Today, and every day but Sundays, over the next nine weeks, we are planning to be at the gym doing some ridiculously intense workouts… starting at 5:15AM. The early mornings may kill me, but we have too many after-work activities to reliably use any other time-slot.

So, if my posting slows down a little, you will know why 🙂

-Jordan

Bikes And Food!

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I think this blog may be more of a weekend thing for a while, as very little post-worthy happens during the week it seems. On that note, this weekend was rather full:

  • Hit the Old Market farmers market
  • Finally managed to see the Con Agra park in the daylight
  • Bought Bikes
  • Rode ~10 miles on the local trails
  • Cooked something like 44 servings of food
  • baby sat for Heather’s cousin

In the expanded view:

The farmers market, every Saturday for the rest of the summer in Omaha’s old market area, was surprisingly active. I was expecting a bit of a slow start considering there aren’t many vegetables ready to eat yet. As it turns out, there were a lot of people selling green onions, green garlic, asparagus, and hothouse tomatoes. Also there were fresh bread and summer sausage type vendors as well. they easily managed to 100% fill the little quarter-block area setup for the market. Heather and I purchased a few things, most notably some amazing multi grain bread. After some time gawking at the different things in the market, we headed a few blocks over to the park.

ConAgra park was beautiful! Heather and I have had the pleasure of walking through the part of the park that is always open during the twilight / dark part of the evening, but never before have we been there during the day. The fountian isn’t quite as amazing in the daylight, lacking its colored lighting effects, but the park itself is really pleasant. The half of the walkway that is on the ConAgra campus was open, so we got to see that area for the first time as well. We spent quite a while setting on a bench beside the lake, watching the fountain and enjoying a beautiful morning.

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Once we left the park we headed back to the apartment for a quick lunch, and then headed out to Bike Masters, a bike shop recommended by my uncle Bill. They were really helpful, and had Heather and I both riding around the parking lot trying out a few different bikes. Sadly I was so occupied trying out the bikes I forgot to get any pictures, but you will just have to take my word for it. We had a lot of fun with that, and finally settled on a bike that each of us liked. Or rather we each found one that we were happy with, we didn’t get matching bikes. I then discovered that my Escape is kind of small inside, and ended up having to make two trips to haul the bikes home, but the shop was only a few minutes away from our apartment.

After hauling the bikes home, and changing into somewhat more appropriate clothing, we headed out to give our new bikes a try! The “Big Papio Trail” runs within a few blocks of our apartment, so we headed to intersect it. Riding on the trail was wonderful, we rode for miles without even noticing the distance we covered. I checked a map later, and we went out about five miles before we stopped in a little park near Center street. The ride back was slightly uphill, and into a slight breeze, making it somewhat more noticeable. It wasn’t painful though, our pace just wasn’t quite as fast.

Sunday, after church, Bethany came over for lunch. I grilled chicken, and we sort of broiled some sliced red potatoes. Counting what we ate at lunch, and what we froze there were ten servings of that meal. We did a large portion by choice just to replenish our stock of quick lunch items. We have been meaning to do a better job of pre-planning the weeks food, and actually got to it this time. Heather and I made up a shopping list, hit the store, and then proceeded to make a pan of enchiladas, a pan of lasagna (we didn’t bake that until Monday) and a big pot of vegetable soup. Needless to say our freezer is very full right now, but we have a variety of lunch options ready to just grab and go for a few weeks.

Baby sitting was interesting, in part because it came at the end of a rather long weekend, and in part because our charge can now walk. He’s still not what you would consider confident on his legs, but being able to pick what part of the house to be in certainly changed how he interacts with the baby sitters. By 8:30pm we had him all changed and put to bed, by 9:00 pm Heather was out cold on the couch. I put a major dent in my book before we were relieved, and I guess did a good job of keeping an eye on the house while everyone else slept? 🙂

I don’t know if we can fill every weekend quite this full, but I think we did a pretty solid job this time around!

-Jordan