Frigid!

Today we're really feeling the bite of winter here in NE Ohio. Temperatures this morning were in the single digits with a bit of a breeze behind them, meaning that the wind chills are dangerously low today. When I still had my old car, a 1987 VW Golf, I would, on days like this, have to start it a full half hour before leaving for anywhere because my gear shift simply refused to work in extreme cold. My washer fluid would also freeze solid, so I often had to drive around in the winter months on very cold days with salt smeared windows. Needless to say, that got very old very fast. My new car, a bright green 2007 Hyundai Accent hatchback, starts right up in this frigid, Arctic cold, it shifts and it actually heats up pretty quickly once you get it going. It really takes the stress off of driving this time of year with having a new car to drive instead of constantly worrying about the old beater and whether or not it would break down and strand me in Timbuktu or someplace like that.

I just really hate these super cold days in the winter. My skin and lips always get chapped, dry and uncomfortable. I also hate to think about the heat bill but I refuse to turn the heat down when it's this frigid because I intensely dislike being cold. This morning, in fact, our church's annex building, which contains our church offices and classroom space where the Adult Religious Exploration class meets during first service, was very cold because for the past month, the furnace has been out of order and the problem is that the church is dithering between waiting for a part for the old furnace that seems not to be coming in anytime soon, or just spending the money to replace the old, inefficient furnace with a new, 95% efficiency furnace that would save on the church's heat bills for the annex house.

Sometimes, dealing with anything at church can be a lot like herding cats, because in typical Unitarian Universalist fashion, no two people can agree on anything and things get bogged down sometimes in competing viewpoints. Well, in this case, their dithering has resulted in an unheated building that the church uses heavily each and every day of the week, and on days like this when it's so cold outside, it's really unpleasant to sit in a cold and unheated building trying to carry on a conversation in a class that could otherwise be quite interesting when instead, we could have been warm and toasty in our church's fellowship hall in the church building proper. But no, the Adult Religious Exploration classes have been permanently moved to the annex house next door. However, until the heat is fixed, I am reconsidering whether to keep going to the classes held there, and if they continue to dither too much longer, I suspect that a lot of meetings and classes that are normally held there will want to move to warmer quarters someplace else, even if that "someplace else" is at a local café or at someone's home. Oh, well, and so it goes, whenever you are dealing with anything UU, I suppose.......

WORKING OUT:

I've been working out for the past year with a fitness trainer who is also my physical therapist. I had two consecutive knee injuries that led to being put through PT and the first time through, I felt sad about having to end my PT sessions due to insurance limitations, because I felt like I was getting such good exercise and was actually beginning to tone up and feel so good that I didn't want to stop. Well, it turns out that Jason, my trainer, was also running a fitness program, mostly geared, admittedly, toward young athletes, but still, I thought, why not give it a try? Well, the first few months were brutal. I discovered that I was really not in the shape that I hoped I was in, was constantly winded during exercises, and worse, I got bronchitis last winter just about the time I felt like I was finally beginning to make a breakthrough. Then I fell on my bad knee and got shipped back to PT again for a month or so, and when I completed that, Jason put me on a kind of "transitional training" program that I just a few weeks ago stopped doing and am getting slowly back to full speed workouts with the rest of the "kids" that workout with us.

I am constantly amazed at how strong I'm getting. Oh, sure, maybe I can't do the same number of "reps" that the kids can do on certain things, and it may be that I never will be able to do that, but I can come close. I'm not as strong as I'd like to be, particularly in the upper body, where I feel like I need the most work. My abs are flabby and weak as well, and need a whole lot of work. My legs are getting really strong as well. My left leg feels weak since I only did my third workout without my brace yesterday, and we did these really deep lunges that I really struggled with on my left leg. I'm going to need to work really hard on building that left knee up after babying it for so long. Since I started this workout regimen a little over a year ago now, I've lost and kept off nearly 20 pounds. My blood pressure is excellent and my cardio-fitness is also really good. I don't get as winded as I did before and I can run up an entire flight of stairs and not run out of breath.

My doctor says that I am the proud possessor of a heart that is much younger than my chronological age of 50! That's very good news and I am very heartened by hearing that. So many people my age are dropping dead of heart attacks and other preventable things that it's good to know that at least that won't be my fate. I'm also trying so hard to eat better and more sensibly. I plan to keep my weight at a good acceptable level and never allow myself to get heavy. I see more obese people - kids and adults alike - that I don't ever want to look like that, ever. While I don't anticipate ever having nice, tight washboard abs, still, all things considered, I think I'm doing very well under the circumstances, for a 50 year old! How many others my age would be crazy enough to subject themselves to the kind of tough workout I do twice a week with kids for whom I am old enough to be their grandmother?