Author Archives: HeyRachey

About HeyRachey

Regular gal discovers gonzo streak midlife. Likes to push self and go fast. Wants to practice (and turn others on to) strength, endurance, speed and audacious authorship of our lives. Life doesn't stay still. Best we move with it.

Looking for a Little Coaching?

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It’s (ALMOST) summer in Seattle, time to get outside, strip down and feel great in your body!

The months ahead offer fun runs, triathlons, city scrambles, and other fitness events, along with weddings, reunions and milestones that call for looking and feeling fantastic.

Maybe you’ve considered getting some help feeling strong, toned, light and energized.

Maybe you’re motivated, but need extra accountability…

Maybe you like being active, but you’re looking for structure…

Maybe you’re bored and want engaging workouts and direction…

Maybe you want to start running, or do a triathlon, but need some training expertise…

Maybe you’ve thought about weekly sessions with a trainer, but aren’t sure you can afford it. That can easily cost $300 a month, and you won’t necessarily get an on-going plan.

I have a proposal for you. In my coaching program, I’ll design weekly workout plans specific to you. We’ll meet in person to get you started. Then, you’ll do your workouts on your own. We’ll talk or email to keep you motivated, and meet in person once a month.

As my client, here’s what you’ll get with this package.

  • A kick-off consultation to discuss your goals
  • One in-person training session a month
  • Weekly email or phone contact as well as tips on motivation, nutrition, and more
  • An online customized training plan updated weekly based on your progress

Your training plan can take you in any of these directions:

  • Couch-to-5K for beginner runners
  • Get Faster 5K, 10K, half/full marathon for experienced runners
  • Multi-sport Mastery – do your first triathlon, or a better triathlon
  • Athletic Advantage – improve your tennis, soccer, hiking, cycling
  • Strength for Life – add smart strength work to your regimen
  • Trim Down Shape Up – before a wedding, after the baby, for a milestone birthday or reunion—a mix of cardio and strength designed to shed fat and build lean muscle.

The Dang Deal: My standard pricing for this coaching package is $190 a month, but I’m offering it until the end of June for $155. And if you’re ready to commit up front to multiple months, you’ll get that same savings for every month of coaching you purchase before the end of June.

In case you’re curious, here’s an example of a coaching plan.

Triathlon Training Plan Sample

Ready to feel fantastic in your body? Let’s get started! Email or call me to ask questions or to set up our first meeting.

About Me: I am a personal trainer certified through the American College of Sports Medicine, and a USA Triathlon Coach. Before turning to fitness, I completed a Masters in Education focused on motivation and play, and I designed games for a living. Now, I put all those things together to give you the tools for living healthy, staying motivated and pushing your fitness to new levels.

Okay People, Dance Walk!

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Hi Everyone,

As I make my way back to posting more regularly, I’m leaning heavily on content by other people. Today’s crutch, cute fitness reporter introduces us to Dance Walking. Please do this today. Won’t you?

 

You Never Forget Your First – Guest Blogger: Jenn Nourse

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Hi everyone,

I’m still working on getting back in the groove here on the blog. In the meantime, I want to share a post from a friend and wonderful writer Jenn Nourse. I love a 10-mile run with Jenn because it includes a wide-ranging conversation and stops for puppies. If you can’t run with her, you can still read her entertaining and insightful blog, The Old Man and the See You Later and in this case, it happens to be about running in the most spiritual sense. So here, reprinted in its entirety, and with photos (that’s Jenn running against the sunset), is You Never Forget Your First. (Thank you Jenn!)

You Never Forget Your First.

I ran my first full marathon last November.  26.2 miles in frigid monsoon weather.  The maxim “you never forget your first” will likely prove true, at least for my hip flexors.  I had the fitness and the ego to run a sub four hour marathon.  I trained under two coaches and hit bootcamp and yoga twice a week in addition to logging and slogging dozens of miles every week for months.  I tend to seek a workout that takes me through the five stages of grief.  But fitness and ego will only get you to the starting line.  Humility and presence will get you to the finish.

Mr. Heart ran the marathon by my side.  He certainly had the ability to pull far ahead, having run 30-something marathons in less than two years,  most of them in the 3:30 range.  But for some reason, still left unsaid by us both, he ran with me.  He joked with me through the torrents (“looks like it might rain today”) and gave my shoulders a solid squeeze when I slowed to a shuffle.  I remember feeling bewildered at my inability to run.  Thanks to track workouts that left me clawing the air for oxygen and long stints of sitting in silence that left me panting for movement,  I was comfortable with being uncomfortable.  But nothing prepared me for my body breaking down.  I watched my ego sprint into the soggy distance, and stepped into the moment.  The truth was, I was hurting.  Badly.  And I wasn’t able to keep my pace, I wasn’t able to simply tolerate and experience the pain.  I had to adjust, to react, and to slow the hell down.  I kept ahead of the four hour pace group for a goodly distance, but at mile thirteen Lucas quietly announced “Jenn, the 4:15 pace group is right behind us.”  I didn’t care.  And it hurt to not care, to realize I was not going to be allowed to care.

photo credit: Louise Lakier

I finished.  And it was awful.  And wonderful.  I came in around 4:21 with nothing left, giddy with pain and emptiness.  I wanted nothing more in the last moments of the race than to stop moving.  I would have traded my Donnie Wahlberg Twitter follow for stillness.  But running asks you to keep going, to lead with the body in lieu of the mind.  To finish.

I became a runner a good league into my adult life.  The solitary accomplishment feels so personal, so private, the urban running community a snug denizen of automatons.  I wasn’t an athletic child.  I was, and still am, pensive.  Thoughtful.  Sensitive.   But in the aftermath of the engagement debacle I found myself in possession of a bulk of unspent feelings and unexpressed hurt.  Meditation helped me make friends with this most unwelcome of masses.  I came to know it well, to accept its existence, and to welcome it into my body.  But it was running that helped me keep stride with discomfort and to finally usher it out.  It was running that forced me to breathe with purpose and effort, to be active in my movement and deliberate in my path.

Much of the time I attempt to make my way towards quietude, in search of my heartbeat.  I meditate in an endeavor to become still enough to feel my own life pulse, to tune into the parts of myself that are living and carrying on without effort.  The parts I must trust in order to live.  The parts I cannot boss around or control or force.  The easy parts.  We forget sometimes there are easy parts.  But sometimes I need my heart to awaken, to be insistent, to stand up and take notice.  Sometimes I need to run.  There will be other marathons just as there have been other loves. But there’s only one first, when you rush into the fray without thought, only to be trampled.  We learn to temper our minds, to pace our hearts.  And the first one breaks us down to the core, so that we might rebuild a little stronger and wiser, a little faster.

Gratitude

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Hi all,

Sorry for the long absence. Many of you know that my dear dad was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer about two weeks ago. For most of that time I’ve been in Florida with him, my stepmom and my sister helping get tests done, seeing doctors, making decisions about treatment and getting it rolling. Of course we also spent time just being with each other. And every day feels like a gift.

Dad started chemo today and is heading out for a brisk walk in the sun.

I want to write something longer, but my message today is just a quick one: look at yourself body, mind, soul, spirit, and find what is healthy and vibrant. Even if you are facing a disease, a disability, some dis-function, there’s some spark (or roaring fire) of health in you.

Find it, name it, feel it, appreciate it, demonstrate it, love it, celebrate it.

Cultivating Mental Toughness

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For a long time I heard the term “mental toughness” in relation to endurance athletes and I always thought it referred to the quality that was needed in the race itself to bear the pain and tedium of long competition. And that’s certainly one kind of mental toughness. But one day I read a chapter by Joe Friel, one of the best-known coaches and authors on triathlon training, that gave me a new way to think about the meaning of mental toughness. His use of it applied much more broadly to training or daily fitness improvement. I use this meaning in conversations with myself and with clients almost every day.

Here are some facets of what mental toughness means. See if you can claim any you could use right now.

  • Having the discipline to fit training and fitness practices into your life, to make it a priority that your lifestyle supports.
  • Finding ways to work out even if environmental conditions or schedule interruptions threaten to derail you.
  • Having a plan for success (a training or fitness plan, a race strategy), or a plan for getting back on track when you do get derailed.
  • The ability to accept setbacks as natural and to learn from them.
  • Recognizing what you can control and what you can’t, and directing your energy accordingly.
  • Having the patience to reach your goals when they aren’t immediately achievable. Persevering through periods when you don’t see much progress.

It’s this last point that’s been coming up a lot for my clients recently. A runner I work with wanted a sub 2-hour half marathon. His previous half marathon times were 2:30 on the same course, and 2:08 on an easier course. He was disappointed when he came in at 2:05. In the moment, it can be hard to swallow, but that’s a massive time improvement! That’s where you have to bring in the mental toughness—the patience and perspective that you’re moving toward your goal even if you didn’t hit it in this race, this year.

If we take this out of a race setting and just look at general fitness, I bet even more of you can relate. If you’ve been in good shape in the past and your fitness has waned, it can be a tough road back IF you constantly compare your prior state with your on-the-way back state. Believe me, I know! There’s impatience, self-loathing, frustration at not being able to do more without feeling winded.

If this sounds familiar, it’s a great time to work on your mental toughness. Shift your focus away from those negative emotions and instead cultivate these things:

  • Your desire to succeed.
  • Your ability to make it important.
  • Your plan for success and turning around relapses.
  • Your patience and perseverance.

The beautiful thing? This psychology applies to the non-physical realm too, right? Right.

Some Technicolor Exercise

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One of my favorite old films is The Women, the 1939 version. There’s a scene featuring Rosalind Russell in a fitness spa. She is such a great physical comedienne, contorting her knees-and-elbows frame, showing terrible form as she gossips on and on and rolls her eyes at everything her stoic trainer says.

I wanted to serve that up as a little Friday treat, but I haven’t been able to find it. In lieu of that, here’s another great vintage fitness-themed clip, that’s pretty fun, and it’s in technicolor and a musical! Plenty of gymnastic male pulchritude here. Enjoy!

Hope you have active plans for the weekend. Let me know what you’ve been up to.

On Fitness in an Emergency

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It’s a snow day in Seattle. Only about three inches so far, but still supposed to snow all day. In this hilly, normally temperate city, that’s all we need to close all the schools and bring on a mayoral plea to citizens to stay home.

I’m a fan of this particular type of Act of God, one that’s gentle, but firm. It’s a reminder that we sometimes have to ditch our plans and be steered by the situation. I’ve been spared bigger, more devastating Acts, but have been indirectly nudged by tornadoes, hurricanes and earthquakes. And I do feel very small in the shadow of those. I’ve had tsunami nightmares for years. After the Seattle quake of 2001, I was terrified and obsessed. I did Red Cross training in CPR and first aid. I made an elaborate emergency kit that I picture will ultimately be inaccessible under a pile of rubble.

Lately I’ve been doing some thinking about the definition of fitness. That may lead to another post entirely, but what got my attention today was this definition:

Physical fitness is commonly defined as the capacity to carry out the day’s activities, pursue recreational activities, and have the physical capability to handle emergency situations.

That struck a chord. Even though, in my meditations on emergencies, I know there are no guarantees and I’m ultimately an insignificant blip in the diorama of a disaster, I take some comfort and satisfaction that I could run for miles if I needed to. I can swim the distance from the Costa Concordia to Giglio Island. I could lift and move some rubble. They just found a 66-year old experienced snow-shoer who was lost for two nights on Mt Rainier. In that scenario, mental and physical endurance training don’t hurt. If I am injured, my basic level of fitness increases my chances and pace of recovery. These may be arbitrary advantages. But who knows? They also could be significant. They give me some feeling of empowerment.

And on a more mundane level, I’m about to go out and shovel our sidewalk. How many times have you heard about folks dying of heart attacks while shoveling snow? Once that’s done, I’ll think about reaping the rewards of fitness by pursuing some recreational activities.

On Taking Micro-Breaks

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Interesting study about the impact that long-term sitting has on your health. Researchers followed 123,000 people over 13 years. Those who sat for 6 or more hours a day were almost twice as likely (37%) to die during the study as those who sat for 3 or fewer hours a day (18%). And that’s regardless of how much exercise they got. Those 6+ hour people may have been super active! They were running, going to spin class, playing soccer, but if they sat 6+ hours a day, they had a higher mortality rate.

What’s a 6+ hour sitter to do? You work in an office or at a table, the stuff’s got to get done– you’ve GOT to sit. Not everyone can mount their computer on a treadmill. (That’s my sis, yo? Her boss set that up! Elea, report?)

Here’s what you do: get yourself on a micro-break program. If you’re self-disciplined, you can set an alarm to go off every hour or so and make yourself take a 5-minute walk-around-and-stretch break. But if you need help with that kind of self-discipline (you’ll blow off your phone alarm, or, more likely, you’re reading this thinking- WTF, take a break?!), then go to this website www.workrave.org and download their free micro-break software.

Get up, walk around. Breathe deeply. Do some Ws. Stretch your hip flexors. Hang out in plank for 30 seconds. You know in your heart that you’ll return to your work refreshed and with more to give.

Create Your Running Form Mantra

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Last week Rachel Scheiner and I kicked off our 12-week training program with a clinic on running form and efficiency. We go over several points about posture, stride length, foot strike and efficient propulsion and give everyone drills they can do to begin to integrate the feeling of each aspect.

Here’s a little primer of some of the points we hit:

  • Posture: Ears, shoulders, hips, knees and ankles are aligned and the entire body leans forward from the ankles, not from the hips.
  • Focus: Look about 30 feet in front of you, not down, and not quite at the horizon.
  • Vertical Bounce: Direct your energy forward, not up. Pick an object in the distance and make that object stop bouncing.
  • Shoulder and Arm Movement: Relax shoulders and let the arms swing in slots next to the ribs. Hands shouldn’t cross the body’s mid-line and shouldn’t drop below the waist. Use your arms- they help your legs move forward.
  • Strong Core: Draw your navel in toward your spine. Give your legs a strong foundation to push against. Develop the core strength to keep from collapsing into your hip on each stride.
  • Little Kick: Activate the hamstrings to bring your foot toward your butt at the end of your stride.
  • Shorter Stride: Your foot should land beneath you, not out in front of you.

We suggest each runner create his or her own chain of short mantras that they can repeat as they run to keep focused on their form. Depending on what technique issues people have, they might create a mantra with several of the above elements. One of our runners Tina had the smart idea of putting these in order from head to foot as an easier way to remember them. This results in mantra chains such as:

Focus out, drop shoulders, navel-to-spine, little kick.

Falling forward, no bounce, arms swing, strong core, feet beneath.

My mantra chain of the moment is: tall and forward, drop shoulders, strong core, hot feet. (the idea of hot feet keeps my foot strike light and quick)

If you’re a runner, or becoming one, check these things out to see if you can become more efficient and less injury prone. And spread the word on this, would you? Living down on Lakeside, I see hundreds of runners a week, and sometimes have to keep myself from shouting out a running form suggestion to them. “Hey! Use your arms!”

 

Resolutions – 10 Days Along

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If you launched a health, fitness, nutrition, wellness, goodness etc. resolution on January 1, you are now 10 days in. Way to be! Even if it hasn’t been smooth or perfect, I commend you. Is it worth doing? Even if you don’t do it perfectly? Yes! In the words of my pal Andy Roo Forrest, “Anything worth doing, is worth doing badly.” So stay with it. When it gets tough is when you get to develop your mental, physical and spiritual strength.

If your resolutions are falling apart dramatically, you may have taken on too many changes at once. Aspirations soar high this time of year, yet lasting sustainable change often takes the form of baby steps. You can stage out your big visions for yourself and get more from your resolution buck by allowing yourself to integrate your habit changes gradually. Focus on just one small change and getting your daily routine and social support organized around that. When you’ve done that one thing for two weeks or so, then introduce phase two- your next small change.

One thing I love about being a trainer is seeing evidence of people taking on changes. Someone I know is quitting smoking (huge!). Someone is trying out a gluten-free diet. Lots of people are diversifying their workouts–adding resistance training to their running or running to their resistance routine. David is doing the N+1 program (1 push-up and 1 sit-up on Jan 1st; 2 push-ups and 2 sit-ups on Jan 2nd; 3 push-ups and 3 sit-ups on Jan 3rd, and so on. As you get further in the program, you can break up your reps into sets of 15 or 20 at a time.) If you like the idea of upping the goal just a little bit and literally seeing yourself get stronger every day, David would welcome you to the club.

Let me know what you’re working on.