Wednesday, August 12, 2015

Still fighting the fight

Last week, I worked as the "fishing instructor" for a local rec department's fishing camp.  I got paid a little bit of money, but mostly I did it to help out a friend, who had lost her long-term instructor for the week.  Things went just fine, I think I gave the kids some good lessons on ecology and sound environmental fishing practices, and we caught a lot of fish.

I also discovered that 5+ hours on my feet every day was very tiring for me right now, especially because I was up early every morning to get to the camp on time.  Not enough sleep and lots of activity just left me tired.

I did manage one CrossFit workout last week, but I did it at a very easy level.

Over the weekend, I got out fishing with a friend, but it was a warm day, and 5 hours on the water was more than enough for me.  The rivers are very warm right now and we fished in the middle of the day.  My friend caught one small wild rainbow and I got nothing.

Other than that, I tried to sleep as much as I could to recover from the previous week.  I managed to do some cooking and mow the lawn, but not much else.  Well, I spent 5 hours trying to upgrade my daughter's laptop to Windows 10, but that was merely frustrating rather than tiring.  She was still on 8.0, which meant I had to apply updates to that OS, then upgrade to 8.1, apply more updates, and then finally try to get to 10.  A tool supplied to MS to skip the reservation process failed for me, so she is now waiting for MS to bless her upgrade request.

On Monday, I wanted to try CF again, but after only a couple minutes of the warm-up, I knew it wasn't there, so I bailed.  I was pretty depressed after this.  I'm trying my hardest to get plenty of rest, eat well, and follow instructions from my doctor, and I feel like I'm not getting better.

My weight on Sunday dropped under 196 - the lowest it's been since late in 2009.  Pants that were too small for me in May are now too large and my belt won't hold them up.  I'm running out of clothes that fit.

Tuesday morning, I had another iron infusion.  They did a CBC panel while I was there, and I was dismayed to find that my hemoglobin had dropped from 10 to 9.4, very close to the lowest value I've seen so far.  Despite that news, I actually felt pretty good on Tuesday.  Maybe it was the 90 minute nap I took during the infusion.

I tried the CrossFit workout again that night, with much better results.   The strength work included 70 deadlifts in sets of 5, and 35 box jumps, also in sets of 5.  I kept the deads light at 155#, but got through that OK.  Next was a 7-minute up ladder - 3 ring rows, 3 goblet squats, 6 ring rows, 6 goblet squats, etc.  I completed the round of 12 and got 10 additional ring rows.  What was encouraging was that I was breathing deeply and feeling like there was actually some oxygen in the air.  I don't know how to reconcile that with my poor HGB result earlier in the day, but I was happy to feel good for an entire workout.

Today is a rest day and I'll try again tomorrow.

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