Mowing my way to fitness...

Saturday, April 30, 2011

It is quite difficult to make major changes in your diet. I have found myself craving certain things over the past few weeks as I’ve switched from a diet that included plenty of grains and starches to one that excludes them completely. I miss my breakfast cereal, French toast, waffles, and oatmeal, but I like the things I’m eating and believe that they are better for me and in the long run will help me lose body fat, build more lean body mass and give me the energy I need to work out, but right now…it’s a bitch.

I started the day with scrambled eggs and mushrooms…which I love…but only when I’m eating it with buttered toast. I grabbed some fruit and headed for Jack’s track meet. He would be running as the anchor in the 4x800 at the Mentor Relays later in the day. I do enjoy the meets, but they carve a large hole in the middle of the day, leaving little time for anything else. This meet would be no exception. By the time I got back home, my shoulder was sore enough that I didn’t want to go out on the bike or do the survival workout. Instead, I opted for a lawnmower workout.

I’ve mentioned how I picked up the non-motorized push mower (they must have a name – probably ‘lawnmower’) and managed to get through the front yard with it earlier in the week. As yet, I hadn’t even considered the back yard. There were sticks scattered all over from the multitude of storms that have been visiting Northeast Ohio over the past couple of weeks, a bunch of Dakota droppings, and the bamboo and decorative grasses I needed to cut down…all before I could cut the grass back there. I’d been thinking that if I put it off long enough, it would snow again and I could wait until next year. Holly had other thoughts on the subject.

I spent an hour getting ready to cut and then pulled the mower out and began the process of pushing it through the too-deep grass. It actually went pretty well. I had to charge some spots where the grass, through Dakota-inspired fertilization, had grown quite tall. I also had twigs too small for me to bother to stoop and pick up jamming into the rotating blades and forcing me to back it off and give it a hard shove. In all, I managed to complete the back yard in around 45 minutes. I was drenched in sweat and my shoulders and arms were quite fatigued from the effort, but it felt good to know that I’d cut the entire lawn and hadn’t used any gas…at $4 a gallon…to complete the task. I’d also gotten what would easily qualify as a decent workout. I’d gotten my heart rate well over 100 beats per minute utilizing the large muscle groups of the lower body…which translates in to lots of calories burned. I don’t know how well it will work when the grass gets really thick over the next few weeks, but I’m determined to see it through.

Lawn mowing duration: 45 minutes.
Training Heart Rate: 100 bpm.
Calories burned during workout: 200.