Day 48 - I had some pie

My mom was here visiting for two awesome weeks, capped by one really great weekend.  We had beautiful weather - almost New England-ish autumn type air, which is unnnnbelievably rare for Hong Kong.  It was just perfect.  Earlier in the week we decided we would celebrate my Halloween birthday (my 36th) on Saturday instead, since mom was flying back out early Sunday.  So, I played a couple of softball games on a glorious Saturday morning, went home and snuck in a nap, then went down the hill to my sister's place for the afternoon and an early dinner.

I carved a pumpkin for my 4-year old niece ("4 and a HALF, Uncle Billy!"; I suppose it is a material difference at that age), while she "helped" by occasionally jabbing the side of the pumpkin with a toothpick.  Not sure the poor guy really needed that while I was already taking a knife to his face.  Not that it was a great work of art by any stretch, but when it was done and I put a candle in it, and brought her out to the balcony to show it to her she gasped and her face lit up more than the pumpkin itself.  That was a great birthday present right there.

I brought my apple, 2 egg whites, and 200ml of milk over to my sister's place with me, and dutifully but ruefully plowed through it while everyone else was eating an incredible smelling veggie lasagna, garlic bread, salad, etc.  I have been very, very good on this PCP so far, basically not slipping off course in the slightest.  But with my birthday dinner taking place around me, I caved.  I had about a 2" mini-cube of the lasagna, which was heavenly, and then after dinner I had a small slice of apple pie with 2 spoonfuls of ice cream.  I didn't even really feel bad about it; I was enjoying the whole day too much for any remorse.

We got home around 9pm, and I still had the workout in front of me.  My calf had really been bothering me for a couple days, and I felt a little twinge while stretching post-workout on Friday.  It had been fine during softball but I didn't want to push it, so called the audible: for the first time all PCP, I was going to substitute jumping with a jog.  After about 10 minutes I called another audible: I wasn't going to do the rest of the workout.  So I ended up jogging 5 miles in 46 minutes, not terribly fast but I was hoping to stay in fat-burning range rather than serious cardio-building range, then did the abs workout, and called it a night.  Pre-PCP I was only making it about 3-4 miles before knees, ankles, etc really started hurting.  Now that I am about 7kg lighter and my legs are much stronger, 5 miles was tiring but shockingly do-able.

So anyway I am a day behind in the workouts - I did Saturday's on Sunday, will do Sunday's today, and instead of Tuesday's rest day I'll do Monday's workout, and then will be caught up.  Basically I moved my rest day up 3 days but am still getting all the workouts in.   Hope that's cool.

*************

A couple things I've been meaning to bring up:
- I have cottonmouth almost every morning.  I am eating my water (I don't think I'm overcooking anything) and I still drink about 2-2.5 liters of water a day.  I'm not sure if the cottonmouth is a sign of dehydration or of something else.  But it sucks.  Is this happening to anyone else?  I haven't seen it mentioned.
- The workouts are really hard for me.  I know that's the point, and any program that ever let us plateau couldn't really be called the "peak condition" project.  But for example, I did all the chest dips the other day, was pretty stoked about that, but then could only do 1 full set of push-ups before sets 2-4 disintegrated into 7, 5, 4 or something along those lines.  It is frustrating.

Anyway, that's all for now.  I had some awesome pie, and I had a great jog afterwards.  Both felt terrific.  Happy Halloween to all, Happy Birthday to me.