Month: February 2009

Jude and I did Crossfit on Friday noon and then again on Saturday morning. I was not too sore from earlier in the week but Jude was pretty sore from CF on Thursday night and then Cardio Pilates on Friday Morning.

To finish off the week, we did ‘the stairs’ on Capitol Hill. Seattle has lots of outdoor stairs because we have so many hills. And these particular stairs are popular for getting a workout. Actually there is a pair of stairs a block apart each going up about 13 flights although I am not sure what that actually elevation change is.

Anyway, we are training for the Columbia Tower stair climb (Bigclimb.org) in March. It is 69 floors and it ends up being mostly a sprint. I did it 2 years ago with a 12 minute time. My goal is to cut that down to at least 10 minutes. So I have been sprinting up the Capitol hill steps for the past few weeks getting back into shape. Yesterday, I did 12 ‘laps’ – some sprinting, some walking but all taking 2 steps at a time. It is a great workout!

Today, I am not sore in my legs but my triceps and upper body is a bit sore from Crossfit yesterday. I’ll stretch it out when I do my Pilates workout with a couple of clients.

It’s been several months since my last entry. You can just assume a combination of busy-ness, laziness and neglect. But I have not been idle in that time.

I have continued my Crossfit workouts and have really started to see and feel changes in my strength. But as I was telling a Pilates client yesterday, “If you really want to make changes in your body, you have to really work hard. I mean the kind of workout that leaves either laying on the floor panting or crying.”

Other workouts, Pilates included, are going to change one’s body but just not as fast. Our bodies crave stasis to conserve energy and as such they will try to sabotage our efforts to make changes. I feel a bit of anxiety every time I go to Crossfit because I know that I am going to be wiped out. But the rewards of having done something you didn’t think you were capable of are great.

And lately, because of Crossfit, I am finding Pilates so incredibly valuable for its complexity, flexibility, range of motion and requirement for a complete body integration. After all Joe Pilates worked a lot with dancers in NYC; a dancer already has a level of fitness and strength so the classical advanced Pilates reformer work can be viewed almost as a restorative – getting the body back in balance with itself.