X Mas Break!!

Ahhh, I officially made it to Christmas Break. I have 13 blissful days of no teaching! Pretty pumped about this one today. Christmas gifts were exchanged throughout the building today. I received several rather nice gifts including a extra early Christmas present from Craig, a new IPOD shuffle. Somehow I managed to bust my old one.

I think my staff members know me to well ha ha. Perfect box completed with Trail Mix, Muscle Milk Light and new crunch granola Cliff bars, which are very tasty.

To celebrate Christmas with my students, I handed each one a Christmas book...too lazy to actually wrap 20 books and they munched on Christmas sugar cookies while they read their new books. We also had a Heritage Celebration. Students had to research a country where one of their ancestors came from. They completed a research paper and poster. To celebrate all their hard work, each student researched a recipe and parents helped their children make the recipe and we had a Heritage Pot-Luck. The kids were stuffed!!

Go figure, majority of the students made sweets to share! It was a perfect way to celebrate the holiday and their hard work.

I can't tell you how happy I am to be on break. I can sleep in, enjoy my time at the gym, relax afterwords, and catch up on Christmas shopping and wedding planning (well needed). Third week since I became severely overtrained and things are looking up, up, up! Yesterday I hit the gym before school and did 20 minutes on the elliptical with low resistance and 15 minutes of walking 4.5 speed. I also did about 20 min of moderate weight lifting. My legs were still stiff afterwords, but no blood sugar issues or major fatigue. I am going to continue to go every other day this week and stick to what I have been doing. Next week, I am going to experiment going two days in a row and see how my body feels. I have made an executive decision that I am not going to return to working out more than 5 days a week.

I always tell myself that I would or will be able to work out 6 days a week, or do ample amount of cardio because I will just eat more. That is my problem, I like routine and adding excess calories to replace my workout tends to never happen. I know my body can happily function on 2,000 cals a day working out 5 days a week with moderate cardio. It is when I go crazy pshyco with my cardio and go 7 days a week that really messes up my metabolism. I am horrible about feeding my body correctly when I amp up my workouts.

It is also nice to have some of my energy back as well as my motivation. I am telling you, the last two weeks I have not wanted to do a thing. I kept telling myself I have all this extra time now that I am not working out so much so I should bake, take Cooper for a walk, make more projects for my students...but none sounding appealing, I just wanted to mope. My mood has increased so much over the past week. Slowly I am coming out of this workout coma and my old self is coming back :) Just in time for the holidays!

I did go to the doc today to get my yearly exam. He was very interested in all my symptoms, I looked at him and said "This is not new to me. You can run a ton of blood tests, and I guarantee everything will come back normal. I just overtrained and this is how my body is dealing with it." He still made me get the blood work done, which was fine with me.

I also want to say thank you for all the great encouraging comments. Sometimes when things like this happen, I don't want to discuss it with my loved ones or friends. I hate feeling like a sympathy case. I don't even want sympathy, I guess it is nice to have someone listen and not feel like I am being portrayed as an obsessive workout freak who can't control her body.