Back to Some Normalcy

What an insane week, guys! I had totally planned to update this on gym days, but that obviously fell to the wayside. But I survived! Got through 8 nights straight and I may have just a teeny bit of sanity left.

In all reality, it could have been worse. I stayed pretty strong for the first 5 nights and then it was all downhill from there, but I got a lot further than I thought I was going to. It helped that things have gotten pretty busy in the hospital this week so we were basically steady all night for most of the nights. Sunday night came though and I hit the wall and I hit it hard. My patience was wearing thin, I was starting to run low on sleep and my food intake was basically consisting of one real meal a day with whatever snacks I had on the overnight. Luckily the one thing that hung on until almost the end was my energy levels. Maybe it's because we were busy, but I was making it through the night without issues and there were a couple days where I would come home and get other stuff done before sleeping. So that part was great!

I wasn't a perfect angel with my eating, but I'd say I was a solid 95%. There were a couple nights I hit up the breakfast potato bar in the cafeteria. Plus Matt and I did a mini date night at Moe's last Friday. I actually found towards the end of the week that I was not eating nearly enough. By the time I was actually getting home in the morning and getting to bed, I was waking up at a time where I basically ate dinner and then hung out until I went to work. So my daily food consumption consisted of whatever snacks I had on the overnight, and dinner. I was eating pretty hearty snacks like yogurt, granola, deli chicken and cheese so I didn't feel like I was starving. But I think that was part of the problem too because my hunger signals get so messed up on nights that I just never really felt hungry and never really felt that drive to eat. The one good thing that came out of it was that I was chugging water like a bandit. I was one well-hydrated machine, let me tell you.

Sleep. Yeah that sucked. The first two nights I just came home and got right into bed. The blackout curtains helped...but only so much. I would get like a solid 4-5 hours straight and then be off an on for another 2. So I was getting by with like 6 hours of sleep. Certainly could have been worse. As the week dragged on though it was harder and harder to wake up and get out of bed and I could feel myself getting a little more worn out towards the end of the night. But I still had the energy to get through most of my shift without having to excessively caffeinate so I'll take what I can get. These past few days I've been focusing more on staying off the phone and just reading a book instead which has helped a lot with letting me chill out before it's time to sleep. The reintegration back to a not nocturnal schedule has been tough. Wednesday night I slept for about 3 hours annnnnnd then was wide awake at 230. Last night was a little bit better but I was still off and on a lot after about 2AM.

The gym is the place where I can officially say I pulled off some stuff that I can look back on and be really proud of. So I knew I would need to find a day last week after work to get there so I could get my 3 days in. I picked Friday. The original plan was to do the 330PM class after I woke up but the more I thought about it, the more I knew that's not what was going to happen. So Thursday night I packed all my stuff up and decided I was biting the bullet and going to the 730AM class right after work. It was dicey because if anything catastrophic happened last minute I wouldn't have been able to make it, but I knew I'd be super relieved to just be done for the day and could just go home and go to sleep. So I did it, and honestly it didn't take as much convincing as I thought it would. I felt really energized and ready to go as I was walking out of work so I just got in the car and went.

The workout was:
3x10 Romanian Deadlift at 55-60% of 1RM deadlift
3x15 supine tricep extension
then
4 rounds for time
6 push jerk
12 reverse lunges
1 mile bike
2 min rest

The romanian deadlifts felt pretty good. They're basically straight leg deadlifts, which up until about 3 months ago I was always doing these anyway because I had horrible deadlift form. I took it easy and did 65 pounds. My back wasn't thrilled about these, but once I learned how to brace myself properly it started to feel better. The tricep extensions I did with one of the training bars which are 15 pounds. It doesn't sound heavy but once you're done with a set after using that slow tempo, you feel it. The conditioning felt really good. I did 65 pounds for the push jerks. I probably could have gone heavier. The reverse lunges went a lot better than I expected. Maybe those split squats are starting to do me some good! The bike it was taking me about 3 minutes to do a mile after finding a pace that I could keep up with the whole time.

Saturday morning we hit up the market for some food. We didn't buy any meat this time, but we got some good veggies. Our planned meals for this week were turkey taco "salads" which are basically ground turkey with taco seasoning, rice and tomatoes. We usually put a can of Rotel in there, but we had so many leftover tomatoes that I just used those and mixed some fresh cilantro in there. The other meal was grilled burgers with corn and a side salad. So we got all the veggies for those. We already had burgers in our freezer from one of Matt's coworkers and that just left needing to get ground turkey at Wegmans.

Sunday was really frustrating. Usually Sundays (or sometimes Saturdays) are our "get ready for the week" days, but with me sleeping during the day and Matt being at work all day both days, we missed out and I felt all kinds of out of sorts. I think that's about the time that I just hit a wall. I was sick of working and done with my normal schedule being royally messed up. Up until that day, I was doing fine and getting through it, but that's when it really hit me that I was at least temporarily still stuck in my alternative nocturnal universe. No meal prep got done and we barely finished the laundry. And it just felt really overwhelming that our week was not going to get off to a good start. We fortunately still had food left over from the week before so we didn't need to go find alternatives, which never ends up being anything good.

Monday I got out of work at 4AM so I drove home, picked Matt up and we went to the gym. I felt strangely pretty good about working out this day too. It helped that I was just full of rage from the night before so it helped to have the outlet.

The workout was:
3x12+12 split squats
4x12 banded barbell curls
then
"Diane"
21-15-9 Deadlifts and handstand pushups

I swear to god those split squats will never get easier. I'm still using an empty bar and it's just about impossible. My quads overall are feeling stronger....except I'm feeling the benefits in movements that aren't split squats. They're just ridiculous. The barbell curls felt pretty good. They just have us using the same weight everytime for now. Diane I felt really good. I finished in 6:09, which was about the same as everyone else. The prescribed weight for the deadlifts was 135, which would be very heavy for me, so I went with 95 pounds. Again, my back felt a little jacked up at first but once I got the form and the bracing down, it felt totally fine. Then instead of handstand push ups I did kneeling dumbbell presses. I felt so weak with those because I used the 20 pound dumbbells and it still was pretty hard.

Tuesday I got out at 4AM, but the gym just wasn't going to happen. I was exhausted and just felt awful. So I went home, took some zyrtec and coma'd for awhile. Got some decent sleep out of it too, which I think I was needing more than anything else. I was disappointed about missing gym time, but I was just done. So I did as much sleeping as I could instead.

Wednesday I got off work and was finally done! Yayyy!!! I was initially planning to find some people that could hang out with me and keep me awake so I could get off the nocturnal schedule as soon as possible, but as some of you likely saw on FB, I deemed Wednesday to be Antisocial Day. I ended up with no desire to be around people. I usually end up doing this every once in awhile after long stretches at my job because by the time I'm done with them, I just want a day where I can lay on the couch and not have to worry about solving problems, using my brain, or really doing anything productive at all. And once I saw it was forecasted to rain all day Wednesday, well, my mind was made up so I went for it. And it was the best decision I could have made. I took a couple hour nap when I got home and once I woke up, I fed myself then laid on the couch and caught up on some TV shows. I don't like doing these days as often as I used to because I end up feeling guilty for it if I start doing it too much, but every once in awhile, I just need the day to recharge. I also end up needing the day to take stock of the tasks I set aside while I was working and figure out when I'm going to get those done. So by nighttime on Wednesday I had a pretty hefty to do list.

Thursday morning we went to the gym. I literally felt like asshole. Not AN asshole, but just asshole. I'd been up since 230 and I now had a splitting headache to boot. So I took some Aleve and we went. It ended up being a really good workout though!

Workout was:
4-5 rounds for time
10 goblet squats
10 box jumps
400m run
Rest 3 min.

Part 2
50'x50' side shuffle
16 alternating walking lunges without weight
5+5 lateral lunge
100' + 100' one arm KB carry

I initially went into this workout just telling myself to move and not worry about my time or how exactly I did. I did the prescribed weight for the goblet squats, which was 35 pounds. The box jumps I initially grabbed a 16" box and just did step ups, but after the first round I realized that I felt pretty good and instead grabbed a shorter box and did the jumps instead. Then instead of the run I just biked for 2 minutes. For Part 2 I didn't do the full 12 minutes because we ran out of time but I got through 1.5 rounds. It ended up being a good cooldown but man my quads were not appreciative.

I likely won't be making it any other days this week. I might motivate myself to go to open gym tomorrow but we'll see. I'm taking the next 2 days to get my house in order because it looks like it exploded on the inside, plus it hasn't really been cleaned since my wedding, so it's time. Cleaning can be considered active recovery right?

Overall, I think this week went much better than I expected. It was tough. That part was expected and really there was nothing I could do about it. But we survived. We're still going to be playing catch up until at least Sunday, but at least we have that day this week to get things done so I don't have to go into another week feeling not ready.

Sorry for the super long catch-up post! Had a few other things to chat about, but I don't want this getting to be a novel, so we'll do it later. Hopefully I'll be able to keep up a little better this next week.

Have a fun weekend and don't melt!