1st week of the Paleo Challenge is officially over

1 week down, 5 more to go with this Paleo Challenge.  My first week has been chalk full of temptations of all sorts.  All in all I think I've done great!  I miss cheese like crazy as well as half n half for my coffee.  I can do this for 5 more weeks.  It'll be so worth it when I go to Boise.  Not only will I thoroughly enjoy my food when I'm there, but I know my clothes will be fitting better and running the 5k will be easier.  I tried on a sweater that my sister gave me a couple years ago.  It's never fit, like not even close.  It was so tight I've contemplated getting rid of it several times.  I was able to wear it yesterday and it fit perfectly.  Hurray!!!! 

Crossfit is always hard, but there are days where it's hard and it feels good, and then days where it's hard and you want to die.  Today I wanted to die. 

Our warm up was kettle bell maxercise.  Basically we did several minutes of nonstop kettle bell exercises. 

Our skill set was all about hang cleans.

It was 10 sets:
flat footed clean pull
hang power clean
hang squat clean
jerk

I loved the jerks.  It was my first time ever doing them.  I must admit I did feel a little bit like a bad ass. 

Our WOD was in a group of 3:

row 3000 meters

120 burpees

I'm slowly conquering my fear of running.  It's not as hard anymore.  Rowing on the other hand suck so bad!  It's crazy hard and my stomach fat likes to get in the way, which makes it harder to catch my breath.  I wanted to quit so bad.  If it wasn't for my group/team, I don't know how well I would've faired. 

It's only 7pm and I'm tired enough to go to bed.  Unfortunately my husband is out of town working, so I'll have to stay up and get the kids off to bed in an hour. 

I'm looking forward to seeing how my body changes during the last 5 weeks of this challenge.  It feels really good to fuel my body on clean foods.  My mood is better, I sleep SO much better, and I think it's a good example for my children. 

The flu from hell....................

I know in my last post I mentioned getting out for a night to celebrate my 11th wedding anniversary....well.....it looks like it's going to be cancelled.  Apparently the flu we all had last weekend came back with a vengeance.  We haven't been this sick in years.  Why did it have to ruin Easter, my anniversary, and wreck havoc on my CrossFit workouts?  I know it's out of my hands but it really ticks me off.  STUPID FLIPPIN' FLU!

On another note, I'm really starting to enjoy finding and eating new paleo foods.  Yesterday I grilled up some turkey burgers and put them on a bed of organic spinach leaves and topped them with slivers of red onion, dill pickle, bacon and avocado slices.  I also baked up some homemade sweet potato fries.  Mmmmm it was so good!  Even the kids liked it. 

Despite not feeling very well, the workout was great.  We learned about dumbbell squat cleans.  Wow, what looks like a fairly simple movement (and it is) is also a great workout.  We did several of these and then learned all about pull-ups.  Only a couple people in my group can do a regular pull-up, so we learned all sorts of modified ones.  After doing several of these we did 5 rounds of dumbbell squat cleans and pull-ups.  12-8-6-4-2

After our workout was complete we talked more about nutrition and how several elements need to be in check for us to succeed as athletes.  EXERCISE~NUTRITION~SLEEP~STRESS
If any of those are out of whack, then we fail to get where we need to be.  My biggest issue will be the sleep part.  I've been an insomniac since I was in grade school.  It takes me a good hour to fall asleep on a good night and on a bad night it'll take several hours or I might never fall asleep.  It doesn't matter how much I exercise, sleep doesn't come easy for me.  Once I'm asleep I'm fine, it's just getting there that's the problem.  I've tried EVERYTHING to fix this problem and nothing seems to work that well.  We'll see how the sleep thing goes after a few months of CrossFit.  I feel like I have the nutrition down.  I like it, it's easy, I feel good eating it, I don't feel deprived.......hopefully it stays that way. 

Tomorrow we are going to do the same workout we did day one.  We're going to see if we can better our time.  I didn't complete it because I was having a moment in the bathroom reliving my dinner, so as long as I can finish tomorrow, I'll be very happy.  I can't believe bootcamp is just one workout away from being complete!!!  It feels good to force myself out of my comfort zone and do something that really means something.  It feels good to tell my kids what I'm doing and why I'm doing it.  I want them to learn that to change your life takes a lot of courage and effort, but it will pay off and be more rewarding than they could ever imagine.  I want my family to see that just because we were raised to love to eat and not exercise doesn't mean that we can't change that about ourselves. 

I'm going to have a cup of tea and maybe a square of dark chocolate while I catch up on some tv episodes before heading to bed. 

What I ate today:

Breakfast~green smoothie(1 cup packed organic baby spinach, 5 large frozen strawberries, 1 cup of unsweetened vanilla almond milk, 1/2 scoop vanilla whey protein powder, 1 TBS organic chia seeds, stevia)
Lunch~3 cups organic baby spinach, few slices of red onion, dill pickle, avocado, bacon, 8 oz turkey burger, dijon mustard
pre workout snack~1/4 cup sweet potato, 1 turkey sausage
post workout snack~1/2 cup mashed sweet potato, 2 oz ground turkey
Dinner~leftover steak and a big green salad with homemade dressing