Birthday, exercise, Nintendo switch.

This is Vince’s birthday week – 17!  what the hell?  I remember being up at 3am when he was a few weeks old trying to figure out how to breastfeed him – all the pregnancy/birth hormones readjusting hourly in my body and crying and feeling terrible and sleep deprived and thinking – omg, I’m not going to be able to do this.  But here we are, lucky to celebrate together. We kicked it off with a mid-week family dinner hosted by my parents.  Vince invited a couple of pals to Urban Hot Pot.  I’m not sure his friends had a good time, but my parents certainly did as evidenced by the 17 orders of fish balls my dad had and the plateful of crab carcasses by my mother’s bowl.  A little challenging for Edda – trying to keep her swinging arms away from all the pots of boiling broth.

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I’m trying to keep up my workout routine, at least on my off days.  For five years, Paul coached me in running and a bit of lifting – enough that I could run 7 miles at a good clip anytime and do couple of dips and a pull up.  I did a track workout and a long run every week, probably averaging just under 25 miles per week.  He’d email me the workouts in the beginning of the week, I’d email him what happened at the end of the week.  Even though I’d failed workouts all the time (Paul, I think, is often overly ambitious for me), I rarely missed a workout.  Every few years, I’d get a bit injured and have to pull back a few weeks or months at a time, but for the most part, it was a nice rhythm and felt good to work hard.  I had to give this up when I started working so much. I tried to keep some semblance of it up for a little while, but I’m quite tired a lot of the time.  I’m on my feet all day at the hospital – covering about 5 miles each shift and the shifts are kind of randomly scheduled, so it’s hard to get a good training rhythm going.  Sometimes I feel great the day after a shift and can run ambitiously, but other days, like today – I couldn’t really get going.  I’ve lost a bunch of my running capabilities because I’m running so much less these days, but I often still can get the feeling of a good workout even though I’m much, much slower.  Most often I get this feeling on a slight downhill stretch in the winter sun in mile 4 out of a 5 mile run or on a treadmill after a 30 min slow warm up.  One of my coworkers at the hospital is a serious lifter, so he’s been nudging me to work on my squats.  My goal is 135 which is this bar I’m leaning against and then the largest plate (45 lbs) – one on each side.  Just a scooch above my bodyweight as long as I lay off the cookies.  He’s like – nah – forget about 135, I think you can do 185.  Ha ha ha.  We’ll see what happens.  The fun is in the trying, right? 

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Vince and his birthday present.