Slack

As I was lying in bed this morning (instead of going out for the bike ride I had planned), I started to think about "slack". By not going cycling, was I "slacking off", or merely cutting myself some "slack" after a tough workout week?

I decided that I would call this "cutting myself some slack", rather than "slacking off", especially if I used the time productively to clean my apartment (I couldn't let myself off the hook entirely). So that's what I did; I spent the morning cleaning while catching up on episodes of Oprah and The O.C. that I had taped this week. I then had a bite of lunch, cleared out my recycling bin and went grocery shopping.

So, Week One of Boot Camp didn't go exactly as planned. I grossly under-ate a couple of days this week and over-ate a couple of days. In the end, I probably ended up even. What I've figured from journalling my food all week is that I need to eat more on days when I'm exercising, but to cut back on days when I don't. Doesn't sound like rocket science, but I hadn't really thought about how to allocate myself calories on a daily basis. Anyway, I'm cutting myself some slack on this front as I'm trying to get more comfortable with how many calories I am actually consuming.

The thing I find hard is calculating calories when I eat out. I'm also very grateful for the mandatory food lables so that when I eat a packaged food I'll always know the number of calories.

On a completely unrelated matter, I had a weird experience when taking out my recyling this afternoon. As I got to the large bins outside my apartment building this man on a bike with a big basket on the back came over to the bin. He was looking to take returnable bottles and cans for the deposit money. He offered to hold the lid of the bin open while I dumped my stuff, but I felt really weird throwing stuff out and then having him pick over my trash. I asked him what he was looking for and he pointed to the beer cans I had in one of my bags. I only had five cans, so I gave them to him directly, even though he said to just throw them in and he'd pick them out. Then he asked me if he could also have the plastic liquor store bags I had used to transport my empties. Sure, why not. Sigh. I just felt kind of awkward and weird about the whole process.

Also completely unrelated, I went to see U2 in concert last night. Two words: OUT-STANDING! I saw them last time they were here -- about three years ago -- and this show didn't disappoint. The coolest/oddest thing was that since indoor spaces are (supposed to be) smoke-free, people don't have lighters the way they used to, so there wasn't any of the traditional "lighter holding". What Bono encouraged people to do instead was open up and hold up their cell phones! The whole place lit up with all the little LCD screens! Then he gave us all the Prime Minister's phone number so that we could program it into our phones and call him and ask him to forgive third world debt. Very cool.

I'm off to a party this evening and then running with some new friends tomorrow morning. It will be my first long run since my race two weeks ago, so I hope I can keep up! I've never actually met these two guys I'm going to be running with tomorrow. We're part of an on-line running discussion forum/club and we live in the same neighbourhood, so we decided to meet up for a run tomorrow morning.