I Finished Insanity Two Hours Ago.

Although, if I were grading myself, I'd probably get a C+. With the + being from pity.

I think it would've been different if I'd been paying any attention whatsoever to nutrition during the second month. I wanted to quit Insanity during the first week of month 2 because the workouts had gotten longer and more difficult. If I'd been eating vegetables and stuff, the right number of meals and calories - instead of skipping meals, letting vegetables rot in the fridge, and my amazing birthday cake,

and too much fast food - I know I would have done better. Last time I did something like this, I learned that nutrition really does affect how great I am.

And so I wasn't great. It's a little disappointing. But not really, because the important thing was to just get through it.

Okay, here's a list of everything I did wrong that wasn't food:

• INJURY DAYS: 5 - Actually, these were legitimate. Jumping wrong = back pain for four days. The other day was a knee day.
• EXTRA REST DAYS: 6 - Maybe I can just call them mental health days? I can't even tell you how luxurious it felt to be like, "I'M NOT DOING IT AND YOU CAN'T MAKE ME!"
• CANCELLATIONS: 1 - It was Shaun T's birthday gift to me.
• CANCELLATIONS, FOR REAL: Okay, there were 2. One of the workouts is crossed off, and I didn't actually do it, and I wasn't going to tell anyone.
• CANCELLATIONS THAT HARDLY COUNT: 4 - See those "Core Cardio and Balance" in the middle that I didn't do? I decided to skip to Month 2 instead of completing the recovery week, because I wanted to make sure I had enough time to "complete" Insanity before we leave for Japan tomorrow, and also Core Cardio and Balance is EZ MODE so I thought it would be okay.
• HALF-DOING IT: 1 - One day, I just played the first 20 minutes of a workout and mostly read a book but sometimes did some of the exercises they were doing on the screen. I think I did about 1/3rd of 20 minutes of that 60 minute workout.
• SUBSTITUTE EXERCISES: 5 - During the second month, on four days, I chose to do an outdoor activity instead of an Insanity. Those were actually still challenging and good (but still technically cheating.) Also, one day during the first month, I chose to do an easier workout than what was scheduled, which was not actually challenging or good.
• SPLIT DAYS: 2 - Some days, the schedule said to do the 8-exercise, 25-minute "Fit Test" to track my progress AND THEN!!!!@!!! do a 60-minute workout on the same day. I didn't do them on the same day.

NUMBER OF DAYS ON INSANITY SCHEDULE: 56

NUMBER OF DAYS I REQUIRED: 72 (EMBARRASSING)

TOTAL NUMBER OF NOT-INJURED 

FAILURE DAYS:

21

OR 37% OF SCHEDULE DURATION

I would say "Oh well, maybe I'll do better next time!" but I don't think there will be a next time. INSANITY IS REALLY BORING.

Really boring, but effective. Obviously. (I'd imagine that ANY workout would be effective when done approximately 6 days a week.) I lost fat and gained more upper-body strength than I've ever had before in my whole entire life, and I made progress on the "Fit Test."

I can now do in rapid succession a lot of made-up moves even better than I could in January! HOORAY!

The View From the Top

I've mentioned that I'm doing the Beachbody workout program Insanity, that it's boring and repetitive and I hate it, and that I'm going to finish it. To keep myself from burning out on it even more than I already have, sometimes I'll replace an Insanity workout with something that's equally challenging but less stupid. So yesterday, when I saw "MAX INTERVAL CIRCUIT" on the schedule, I thought of my I-don't-have-to-work-out-today-because excuses for like five minutes (as I do almost every day) and just went running, instead. Up a mountain.

Well, not exactly a mountain. There doesn't seem to be an official size definition of what makes a mountain, but it used to be 1,000 feet, or 304.8 meters. The land mass half a mile from our apartment building, "Hill 303," is 303 meters. So...almost.

So I jogged over there, set my timer, and started going as fast as I could. I saw one American couple, and quite a few older Koreans. The Koreans were mostly dressed in long pants and winter coats and, along with the normal encouraging thumbs-ups and words that I had no idea what they meant, I was asked a few times if I was cold in my shorts and tank top. It was about 60 degrees out there, and I was being super active, so I wasn't. But the only time I don't get asked that is when it's like 100 degrees.

It took me 19 minutes and 50 seconds to get to the war memorial at the top of 303. I felt like I was asphyxiating. I hung out up there until I could breathe again, took a couple phone pics, and started back down.

20 minutes plus the short, easy jog from our apartment to the hill-mountain wasn't much of a workout compared to the 55 minutes of stupidity I would otherwise have had to endure, so I decided to run up to the helipad, too. Then do pushups (even though there were people up there so it was awkward.) I did three sets of 20. I was really impressed with myself; four months ago, I ended a two-minute pushup challenge with a score of 14 pushups.

See? You can see the H on the helipad from space.

THE END!

I Keep Wasting Our Money On Drinks

A few years ago, I turned 21. On my birthday night, Joe brought home - along with salmon fresh from the seafood counter and hash browns from the freezer section - some wine. I'd never tried alcohol (except, you know, sips from my parents' like three drinks total that they ever had the entire time I was a kid.) I tried really hard to drink the wine, because I really wanted to get drunk, but it was disgusting so I didn't.

In the years since then, I've ordered mixed drinks here and there. I even drank the one that tasted like a milkshake, which probably had a 2% alcohol content, and then giggled a lot to make myself feel tipsy. Then, on a cruise last summer, I tried a few more times. One day, I stared at a bar menu for approximately ten minutes before ordering something with orange juice and "Amazon" in the name. Here's my "look at me by the pool with a drink" picture.

You may be able to tell from my expression that this picture was taken 30 seconds before I went back to the pool bar guy and asked him to put more juice in it, and about 6 minutes before I took the 3/4ths full glass back to him on our way to find something else to do.

Then, a few months ago, we were at a restaurant with our friends Kelsey and John. Kelsey had been introducing me to girly alcohol for a while to see if I'd like any of it, but I'd always ended up sticking with her sweet tea, instead. At the restaurant, she ordered an Amaretto Sour. I tried it and WHOA, IT TASTED LIKE SOUR PATCH KIDS GUMMY CANDY. It seemed I had found something I could drink!

That's what I tried to make last weekend. I went to the PX for Disaronno and sweet & sour mix. They didn't have the sweet & sour, but the internet said I could make some with lemons and limes, so I bought all the lemons and limes. The PX usually carries miniature bottles of Disaronno, but they were all out, so I had to buy the $12.95 bottle, thinking, "Man, that's a lot of money for something I'm going to end up pouring down the drain."

I got home, made the lemon-lime-sugar stuff, mixed up a really weak drink. It really didn't taste like candy. I added more lemonlimeade. Still tasted bad. Thought maybe some cherry flavor would give it what it was missing, and we didn't have any Maraschinos, so I added KoolAde powder. Still didn't taste like candy. You know what candy is made of? High fructose corn syrup. So I added some corn syrup I had left over from making pecan pies at Thanksgiving. It just kept getting worse. At one point, I think about a quarter of the drink was corn syrup. I dumped it out.

Joe tried mixing something up for me. His concoction included orange, coconut, and vanilla extracts and was actually palatable (after I added even more limonade.) I put the concoction in the fridge to chill so I could drink it later that night.

It's still in there.

And there's the rest of it, in the cabinet over the fridge, where alcohol goes to wait to be poured down the drain.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Happy Valentine's Day! (Yeah, it's March 4th. What of it?)

V-Day fell on the day before what was somehow a 4-day weekend for us. Joe left for work early that morning. I expected him to come back and have breakfast with me like usual, but he never came back and I never got around to having breakfast. I left to do my errands, and the longer they went on, the more starving I got, until he called me from home around lunchtime and I started yelling at him because the Post Office wasn't going to be open until 1:00. He was about to take a taxi back to work, but instead he walked to post so he could bring me a granola bar so I would calm down. It worked, and I got my box (of Christmas presents) mailed and did my grocery shopping.

When I got home, the TV was on and my computer desktop had been changed.

The TV was playing Tangled, the Disney movie I watch all the time for the music and the part at the end where he gives her the floating lanterns, and she's like, "I'm starting to not be scared anymore, know what I mean?" and he's like, *doesn't take back his satchel that she's holding out, because he cares more about being in the moment with her* "I'm starting to," that always makes me tear up. So, that was on. Also, Joe had changed my desktop picture from a series of photographs of ice to a bright red Valentine's Day art with hearts. There was a note that said "Happy Valentine's Day! Enjoy some lovely candies!" that referred to the milk and dark chocolate peanut butter cups and raspberry cups in the fridge that Joe had made the day before. My day had just gotten 300x better.

After I put away the groceries, I made Joe's V-Day present - white chocolate and milk chocolate dipped Nutter Butters and Oreos. Pretty lame if you think about the lack of effort involved, and if you knew how bad the white chocolate tasted, but at least the milk chocolate ones were great. That was a very nice weekend.

In other news, we have less than 60 days left here in Korea. I will miss this place. It will be one of the most interesting parts of my life for a while, I think. I wish we had time to explore more. But I - who came here with two suitcases of clothing and pots and pans and important documents because the rest of our ~6 tons of collected life remains in a storage unit in Virginia; who has gone over 18 months with no job (hehe yay); who chose not to pursue forcing pregnancy while here; and who just decided to get educated when I get home - also have some getting on with my life to look forward to.

One for my archives: I wanted to memorialize my attempt at working through the 60-day "HARDEST WORKOUT EVER PUT ON DVD!!!!1!1!!111" Beachbody program Insanity. I hate it. It's boring. It is too hard for me. I take days off when I'm not supposed to, I cheated a little bit by skipping some of the easy parts in the middle to make sure I'd be able to complete the program by March 31st, and once in a while I'll substitute one of the workouts with something else that I hate a lot less. But I've gotten this far, and I will finish it.

That's all here. Well, not really, I could keep going, but I have to save something for my next bi-monthly post!