Since it unfortunately also wakes me up (and no, I don't know why; it's quite exhausting at the time), and I haven't yet wound down from tonight's training enough to sleep, here's the short list of UWH's many awesomenesses:

• Stellar sportsmanship, at least on all the teams I've played with — there's friendly competition, sure, but violence, cheating, and being an asshole to people are uniformly and consistently discouraged
• Nice opportunity, at least, for gender balance — the game is definitely not in any way easier if you're male, and in countries-that-are-not-the-U.S. there are plenty of mixed as well as women-only leagues.  (I'm not generally a fan of women-only leagues, because ahem that's called separate-but-equal and it doesn't work, but it's nice that there are enough women players in many places to warrant them.)  The teams I play with are all cross-gender, and especially considering the possibility for problems that you'd expect in a swimming sport, they all handle it *beautifully*.  I've never seen a single instance of harassment or anything like it.
• Lots of ways to be good at it:  Swimming fast, having great endurance, having a long breath-hold, stick-finesse, and having a good brain for positioning can each make you a great player, and whatever you're good at, you've got something to work on, too.
• Freaking awesome exercise.  Many recreational sports are actually "eh" when it comes to getting and keeping you in shape, but you can NOT beat swimming your butt off in a fast-paced environment that keeps challenging you to push your limits and is never ever boring.
• Great intellectual challenge!  Stick-work is really difficult to get right and amazing to watch when people can do it; and the usual positioning and teamwork of regular hockey is *mega* harder when you're trying to anticipate yours and your teammates breath-hold times and rotations from the surface to the bottom of the pool.  Add occasional other twists like pools with "deep ends", slopes, etc., and it's like the fastest-moving chess you ever saw.

…And hopefully that is enough to get me started on my way to bed (having eaten something will help I think; I finish hockey practices hungry, but man the food you get afterwards is some of the best food you'll ever eat — one of my favorite things about swimming in general; do enough of it and you work up the best hunger ever).  Hope everybody's having a great week!

PD

[P.S.  Because I am insane and the scheduling couldn't be worked out better, I also have my kungfu/taiji lesson early tomorrow morning -- so hockey kills my evening nap and then kungfu wipes me out in the morning -- augh!  This is definitely resulting in my finishing Fridays a bit short of sleep, but I've been letting myself sleep in on Saturday to make up for it, and that's been working.  More postage (?) on exercise & napping lately, but this post warranted a note to say "yeah, hockey does sometimes mess with my sleep, but at least so far it's workable".]

Today I have to pack for a long trip in ways that are both inclusive of lots of Xmas presents, and that can be fit on a train.

This afternoon I have one last chance for swimming/hockey training and I won't get anymore until mid-January, so I'm taking it hell or high, um, water.

Tonight I have one last non-family-intruding date with my dearest.  Taking that too.

Tomorrow at 8am I have to be across town for one last taiji class before I miss 2 weeks!  Not missing that either, thank you.  ;)

And then tomorrow at noon I have to catch a loooooong train.  It will be dull, and I don't have a sleeper car (not much sense since I can almost never sleep on moving vehicles anyway), so I'm hoping I'll spend it writing!

(Err…did anybody see anywhere in there that I can catch a nap??)

((Kidding, kidding!  I'll get one eventually.))

(((THIS is why I hate holidays though. >,< )))

I know you can't hang much on search terms, but it still weirds me out that the second most used search term to find this site is…."women what the fuck happened".

Then again, on another level that makes me a fierce sort of happy.  And I like the fierce happys.  You get those from hockey too!

And speaking of underwater hockey, I'm now doing that twice a week in addition to weekly taiji (and its attendant should-be-and-nearly-is-daily practice).  This has caused me to back off of P90 a bit, but not to abandon it — the cardio workout, specifically, is really useful for hockey and I can feel it helping, so I'm keeping that at least 3x a week, even if I miss the other one.  Oh, and on Mondays, when I have both taiji and hockey?  Er, no P90 that day, thanks.

I could try to describe what has kept me away from the Internets almost entirely for half a week, but I seriously don't think you all want to know.  Think phrases like "production downtime" and "24-hour shifts" and you'll start to get the idea.  My job is awesome, but the piper she does come collect sometimes!

So my favorite short story that I have ever written got its rejection letter a few days ago — right after I worked a 24-hour shift actually.  I mean to say this with the same half-bruised nonchalance that your rather wild friend may say to you one morning, "So last night a cop kicked me in the ribs."  There's nothing you can say back other than a sympathetic "Ow", and that's ok.  I'm angry that the story is a) too specific to really publish anywhere else (it was for a particular anthology) and b) being held onto by said anthology in case they want to use it for a future one, so I'm not even sure I ought to publish it myself, i.e. here.  Annoying, world.  We can do better than that.

Speaking of "better" and "writing", it's also NanoWriMo finally!  I love Nano — the 30-flash-fics version of NaNoWriMo — because last year I could feel it making my writing better, and this year, even though I'm behind by 3 stories already (see: 24-hour shifts), I'm already impressed with what's coming out.  Flash-fic is so useful that way, for making you write beginnings and endings, focus on revealing and concealing, and burn the dialog into the tabletops because it has to stand out in a sub-1K work.  ::shivers with awesomeness::

Anyway, I am sorry that updates have been shit this week…sleep kind of flew off the rails (again, see: 24-hour shifts — though I should add that my ability to snag a nap, and to wake up after 3 hours pretty reliably, came in amazingly handy too), and I'm only really just blinking my way back to coherency (and even so, wondering why it's Monday and not Saturday…I spent the whole weekend working!).  I'll come up with something useful to say soon, promise.  In the meantime, everybody have a great day/week/etc.!

P.S.  Oh, because I always forget to mention stuff like this:  I got interviewed!  Um, like, three times last week, if you count the one that was for underwater hockey too.  (I'm a newbie, but they wanted to interview me…why?  Because of my "bright, interesting" tattoo.  And probably the fact that i was the only girl there.  Ah, well; fame she is fickle. ;)  …The two that were for polyphasic sleep were encouraging, though; the quality of information seems to be going up, if one can take interview questions as an indicator.

OK, off to try and catch up on those stories!  Then nap, taiji, work, nap, hockey and a sleep that will probably feel blissfully like being in a coma.  ;)

• Lets you pick from a preset list of videos, or anything on YouTube, to wake up by
• Works entirely in-browser
• Nice big numbers for glancing at the screen if needed
• Easy to use once you figure it out:  Push the "Update" button to sync the clocks, and then "+15" or "+30" to automatically tune the alarm to that much later (or just adjust the numbers manually).  Don't forget to push the "SET ALARM" button on the bottom!

So, for instance, if you have the new MC Frontalot video totally stuck in your mind, you can now reward yourself with it as a wake-up call, easy as pie.  Or you could watch that awesome Space Lord / Time Lord mashup yet again; or bump up your mood with Weird Al's Anime Polka; or get inspired to craziness with some parkour.  Tons of possibilities, there — and the nice part about a video is that you won't want to just lay there and listen to it; it virtually screams get up and look at this!

P90 itself:  So far, so good.  I like:

• how it only takes up about half an hour's time — an hour, once you count shower etc., but still that makes it not much more time-intensive than my morning nap;
• how it makes me break a sweat, but not be all GRRRRRAAAAAAARGH! to make it to the end.  Don't get me wrong, I like being all GRRRRAAAAARGH! sometimes, but not every morning.  It's an energy-expenditure thing.  Sure, I can do an hour of plyo, just like I can shore-dive for half a day and swim home basically on my lips and sheer willpower, and sometimes those things are fun.  When I do climb those mountains, though, I have a valley on the other side to deal with:  I'll need extra sleep, and extra food, and to generally not move much for the 12-24 hours after a GRRRAAARGH!.  (Why yes, I have nounified that sound.  Take that, onomatopoeia police!)  What I want for a daily morning workout is one that burns some calories to offset my sedentarycomputerness, stretches and strengthens all the bits I need for kungfu/taiji, gets me warmed up so I don't feel like I'm dragging in the morning, and leaves me with all the energy I need for a whole day and to do it all again tomorrow (assuming that either today or tomorrow also includes swimming or taiji, and that both include a few miles of walking) on 5 or less hours of total sleep.

  (IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK, haha.)  But as with most things, now that I know what I want more precisely, it's easier to get — and so far P90 seems to fit the bill.

  ONE CAVEAT this experience has taught me about:  The "fitness tests" for programs like P90 / X / Insanity / etc. only tell you if you can do that level of workout, not whether you will want to.  I haven't failed a "fitness test" yet, but P90X was too much for me, not because I couldn't physically do it (well, it wasn't kind to my knees, but that was probably surmountable by itself) but because it was more workout than I was looking for.  Be aware of this if you're looking similarly.
   

• I like how the pace is not too fast, so that if you know the instructions and whatnot already, you can get a little bit ahead.  This is useful for Real Life Considerations like needing to pee, stretch your neck, chase a cat out of somewhere it shouldn't be, etc., and it's nice not to have to pause the video for that.
   
• Takes less equipment than P90X, though to be fair neither of them are horrible on the I-need-equipment front. 
   

And my dislikes are pretty much par for workout stuff in general:

• It's cheeeeeeeesy, made worse (or better, depending on your tastes in Cheese) by lower production values than P90X.  Tony himself is also considerably less "smooth" and comfortable with his banter, though personally I find better banter even cheesier than bad banter, so again, it's about which flavors of cheese make you wince, and which make you vomit.  ;)
• Horrible background Muzak, but thankfully at low volume
• Hilariously unrealistic "students" (note: P90X actually didn't have this problem; those were real graduates of the program and nicely non-model-looking for the most part — maybe Tony put his foot down after he got some corporate traction?  But in P90 they're pretty much what you'd expect from this type of thing…)
• Generally not fun to watch at all…but really, how much does this matter, since the goal is to not really have to watch it?  At least with P90, putting it on mute and keeping half an eye on it while you blaze through it is much easier to attain than with X, which is 2-3x as long and goes twice as fast!

…Being me, I'm already wishing I could combine this activity with, I dunno, memory exercises or learning a language or something.  And maybe I can eventually, but it's not wise to stretch too far too fast.  Last thing I need is to hurt myself because I was conjugating instead of watching my form!

OH, you probably care about results too.  ;)  Well, with uneven application and fairly miserable adherence to the diet (more on that in a second), I still feel good and look noticeably more awesome than before…my leg-muscles (which have always been prominent) are approaching "oo wow" status, and my arms (which usually just look biggish when I exercise) are getting tricep cuts, which is cool.  Best of all, I've lost just enough padding-in-general that my stomach is, while not something I'd show off for money or prizes, officially technically "flat".  I'm starting to see the musculature there, too.  And this is awesome — one of the (several) reasons I work out is that I'm built short and muscle-y anyway, and I knew from long ago that if I got a more regular routine set up, it would be relatively easy for me (relative compared to naturally skinny people) to show muscle and look badass.  Stomach cuts are a sort of the meat and potatoes of that, yeah?

DIET ADHERENCE:  I did it for the first 3 weeks of P90X, mostly because I was afraid of hurting myself otherwise.  I ate 1600-1800 cal a day (1800 was supposed to be my goal, but in the end I could hardly ever hit that), with a heavy tilt towards protein and away from carbs.  I learned that a looooooot of my normal diet is carbs!  I'm still trying to keep the carbs lower and the protein higher, even though once I stopped P90X I (gratefully) stopped worrying about the exact ratio and frantically trying to get 18 million calories in me before bedtime…whew.  I'm back to my usual 1400 or so now, and I feel fine, but I do want to eventually — when I have the brainspace probably — work more on getting better food, and in better proportions.  I know my current habits, which evolved from an allergy to cooking for myself, aren't keepable in the long-term; I can do better. 

And of course:  SLEEP!  Oh, the wonderfulness of having my schedule back…even when it gets thrown off (which it did once this week, majorly enough that I slept 8 hours once to compensate), that only serves to remind me how much better Everyman is than monophasic.  Possibly the only thing better than a morning workout is a morning workout followed by a nap — *awesome*.  (Slight downside:  I definitely get ANGRY if I can't have my afternoon nap; the workout in the morning makes it feel quite mandatory.  But that's just motivation for me to get it, which I need, since breaking up my workday goes against my natural workaholism. ;)

OK, I think that counts as a real, full-size update…Oh, for people who care, I'm also finally reading The Four-Hour Body; I'm sure I'll have opinions on it as time goes on.

Thanks for reading, everyone!  Have a great week if I don't talk to you before the weekend. 

PD

But you probably care more about all those updates I haven't been getting around to…I'm sorry; this week has just been horrendous, really.  And it isn't really slowing down, so this will be in the form of bullet-points for now…my hope/plan is to slow down this weekend and do some real substantive writing, here and elsewhere.  ::hope hope hope::

• Sleep goes well.  This week has been ridiculous so I've missed some naps, but overall I dropped right back into my Everyman Mixed (? Can I call it that?) schedule, where my goal is 3×3, but if I get shorted on naps I do 2×4.5 or 1×6.  As long as I get some 3×3 days every week, this seems to work without issue, but I've definitely noticed that if I get stuck in 2×4.5 / 1×6 for too long, I start to get tired.  (Specifically, a week of 2×4.5, or more than a few days of 1×6, will make me tired and I'll need catch-up sleep, after which I can go back to polyphase.)  I think this is evidence that 3×3 is the most stable one overall — which has been my long-term experience — and that, more generally, the more naps you get, the more stable and restful your polyphasic schedule.  But it remains nice that missing naps doesn't have to knock me completely off-schedule; as long as I keep trying for them, I'm OK even during the most insane weeks of work / practice / errands / etc.
   
• Exercise goes well too.  I'm sorry I didn't get to update as I made this transition, but what I did is try out Insanity and P90 as possible alternatives to P90X (which I did for 3.5 weeks — but it was too long and too intensive and thus making my sleep schedule impossible).  P90 won.  One of the things I really liked about P90X was the focus on form — as a martial artist and someone who picked up fitness as an adult, I care a lot about economy of motion and avoiding injuries — both short- and long-term.  Insanity is definitely named correctly, because it seems to me that unless you're already capable of doing the whole thing by muscle-memory, doing it at that speed is dangerous.  P90, on the other hand, is a nicely shorter version of P90X, keeping most of what I liked about the program without killing me to the point where I need to sleep for years.  ;)  It's still challenging:  Though I've been surprised at how I can "just do" most of it without petering out, and I finish all the workouts which I couldn't always do with X, I'm still out of breath and sweaty and feeling it in the right muscles, but I can take naps and my core and still have enough energy, including for things like taiji and hockey.  I'm nearing the end of week 1 of P90, and so far I like it a lot.  (Note:  It's just as cheesy as P90X, but I'm coming to the realization that all such programs are cheesy.  I can deal.  And it won't take me as long to memorize these so I can just tune them out and listen to music, either!)
   
• My new exercise clothes are AWESOME.  Icebreakers are expensive, but if you work out regularly and hate doing piles and piles of laundry, they're completely worth it.
   
• There's other stuff, but as I keep getting distracted by work and stuff and risk not posting this at all if I don't do it now, I'm stopping here!  ;) 

Have a good Thursday the 13th**, everyone!

*Title note:  One of the most awesome songs ever!  One day I will make someone play it in karaoke or something so I can yell those amazing lyrics at the whole world…Go forth ad infinitum!

**For some reason Thursday the 13ths have always gone worse for me than Fridays.  Thursday the 12ths can be pretty brutal too.  And of course October is a mandatorily creepy month for either. 

So that's exciting.  ;)

Today I feel fine.  Didn't want to get up at 4am, but it's chilly and raining, and I was more "enjoying snuggling and listening to a thunderstorm" than sleepy…felt fine once I was up.  I also definitely wanted my morning nap, and slept awesome for it, though I do have that lingering "hmm could I go for a few hours of unconsciousness" feeling.  No other symptoms of sleep-dep though.

Maybe tomorrow, or tonight, things get really hard and I have to go through the whole gamut of adjustment funhouseness over again!  Or maybe nothing happens and I get to just sail through, just happily being on my old schedule again.  (I do feel mentally about a thousand times better…and it's hilarious how many people grabbed me yesterday to say THANK GOD YOU LOOK *SO* MUCH BETTER DON'T EVER TRY THAT MONO CRAP AGAIN!)  And man, once again, 4am was wonderful.  Writing (new story submitted!) and new Chen Taiji exercises, plus time to do an entire ground-up config on my main machine, which had to be rebuilt yesterday and is now in prime fully-installed condition in time for work.  Woot!

As to adaptation, whether or not there'll be one this time, I can only wait to find out…and let's face it, I don't really care.  It could be a full-on Uberman zombiefest and you'd find me sitting here humming like a happy kid.  (In fact my only regret remains that I can't do Uberman…but I've got my eye on you, full-time job, and the second you slip, watch out!)

Hope everyone's Tuesday is even half as awesome as mine!  I'm going to go spend a ton of it at work now, but hey, I had 4h of "playtime" before that, and I'll have nearly 4h of not-working afterwards too…so I can't argue with that.  ;)

Peace and Polyphase!
PD

Not writing this in the WordPress editor like a smart person…yes, yes, we can imitate smart people well…good for us…

So, speaking of smart people, WHAT THE HELL WAS I THINKING?

You all need to do me a favor, seriously. The next time I make some silly remark about how I'm going to go monophasic for some reason or another, come to my house and slap me. Remind me that I've hated every day I've been monophasic since the year 2000! If needed, force me to read all my old blog posts that unequivocally prove this, and then make me do forms or drink tea or something until my semblance of sanity returns. An extra slap or two, or some forced administration of coffee, may be needed. Don't be shy.

In other words, ::face.palm::.

So I had the weekend to plan, to figure out what to do with the month of exercise that ate my every morning, and the pile of writing I wasn't getting done instead. And the answer was pretty freaking obvious: I need my sleep-schedule back. I love a regular workout and yes, as this experiment proved, a high-intensity one is great and I enjoy that, but if it can't fit into my schedule then I don't need it that badly, period. (Especially not when I'm already fit and look and feel fine; I just want more endurance and possibly some abs to show off. This is not grounds for losing hours (1.5 – 3hrs at night + 2h in the morning for extra sleep, and then 1.5 in the a.m. to work out) per day. I guess I can see how I made the decision to try it, but wow did I underestimate what those hours were worth to me.

So, this weekend was actually rather hectic, in its way, and in the end I realized that this is the one change I need to make, and the rest will have to be ironed out afterwards, once I have time to cogitate, read some more, and make better plans. I got a loaner copy of "Insanity", the recommended lesser/shorter version of P90X, to check out; and I'm also reading The 4-Hour Body finally. My new exercise routine will probably come from one of those (and possibly some P90X too…I did like that, as a workout) and I imagine that it'll take me just a few days, now that I have my 19-hour days back, to figure out which and how. I've set aside 6am daily as my exercise time. That's when I was getting up, before – 6am, so that I could roll out of bed, work out, hit the shower and run to work, with barely time for a cup of coffee. Now at 6am I'll be coming off about 1.5 hours of writing, and not feel like my whole morning vanished in a puff of gasping and sweat. Much. Better.

So, after a month of sleeping 10p – 6a like a good little standard human critter, I'm writing this at 4a.m.

And god it feels good.

As for adjustment, I took, but didn't really sleep for either of my naps yesterday – to be expected – so I went to bed at 23:30 figuring it made sense to start with E4.5, and I popped up easy as you like at 04:00. (I have appointments several evenings this week, including tonight, that will keep me from getting my evening nap, so Everyman 4.5 seemed to make more sense to adjust to. I suspect turning the dial to E3 once there's a free-ish block of time to do it in will be easy, at least for me.) The hard part will be making sure I get my afternoon naps at work, which were plenty challenging before I got myself and the rest of the office used to just plowing through that period. I shall have to be strict about it.

My mornings (I could sing that phrase! ;) look like this now:

4am – Wake up
4:30 – 6am – No-effing-around writing time
6am – Workout time; workouts should be short enough to get me out of the shower by 7:30
8am – Head to work; except on Mondays when early taiji means I have to leave by 7:30

Woot! That's more like it.

The evenings…well, I've always struggled with making my evenings productive; I run out of mental steam during the day and often spend the evenings reading, surfing, making chainmail and watching TV, or playing video games…not my best uses of time, there. But even if that stays the same for now, I will feel much less stressed having until 23:30 or 01:00 to stay awake and "relax" than I did having to turn in by ten p.m.

OK, I have other writing to do this morning too so I'd better hustle…but YAY for Everyman and seriously, don't ever let me do that Monophasic crap again! (My husband agrees, by the way…the look of relief on his face when he saw me up at 4a.m. was epic. ;)

So.  When I lost weight using the 6x 200-calorie meals / day "Polyphasic Diet", it took about 5 weeks to really start showing.  It was pretty easy to maintain by that point, but whew, I remember about three weeks in thinking, "This is just impossible."

And tomorrow will be the last day of week 3 of P90X.  Next week I'll be 1/3 through, but the chunks go [(3 identical weeks + 1 different week) x 3], so it does feel like the end of this week is accomplishing something. 

But of course, it's still week three.  I don't really see much difference*, and man, I'm missing the time and effort this is all costing.

Fortunately, many things have taught me not to quit at week three, probably most of all polyphasic sleep itself, which is really easy to quit at about week 3 if you're not careful…The early exhaustion can be gotten through with guts alone, but the following couple weeks of time and effort to work it into one's lifestyle fully are, I would argue, sometimes even more exhausting than zombie-mode.

*It's not that I see no difference — actually my arms and stomach are minimally, but noticeably, tighter, and my shoulders and legs are definitely on the muscliest side of normal for me.  But it's not really a motivating difference.

I had prepared a bit for this, though that preparation came in the form of just plugging along, in a sense.  But I've made sure to let my days of success (which has been all but a few of them) accumulate weight that lends more legitimacy to my fitness as an ongoing enterprise, deserving of effort and investment**.  As such, my awesome workout clothes (all sale items, thank goodness) should be here any day, and my giant box of awesome Builder's Bars got here yesterday.  I'm also perfecting chocolate milk — improvements include a few trials of protein powder and an upgrade (definitely upgrade) to soymilk.  These little advances function not just for making things easier as they go forward, but also as gifts — achievement rewards, to the MMO-acquainted — to help motivate me forward.

**I would like to make it less of an effort and investment than it is now, don't get me wrong.  But changing takes a lot of effort itself, and once you've gotten past that part, you can work on making things more efficient.  I'm still holding out hope that I can try getting my polyphasic schedule back during the remaining 9 weeks of P90X, but if not, I'll focus on finding a maintenance workout to follow P90X with that takes less time and isn't so intense that I can't go back to Everyman.  (Yeah, going back to Everyman is not optional; I miss it crazy bad.)

The diet goes well too, though hitting the protein/carb balance they want for the first three weeks (50%/20%) is haaaarrrd, and there've definitely been days that I was off by a bit.  Having too many carbs vs. protein will make the "slimming down" part go slower (or possibly just not work I guess, though I should be/probably am losing fat just from burning extra calories and building muscle too — and I had minimal extra fat anyway), but that's not my biggest worry.  I like being on the thin side, sure, but I'm also old enough now to not care so much — I've shaken off the ad industry's insistence that thin is (and only is) beautiful, thank goodness.  I do find health beautiful, but I can feel totally gorgeous with a little plump on me, no problem.  (And personally speaking, I dig curvy women — I'm too small to be a proper one myself, but healthily plump hourglassy women are my favorites to look at for sure.)

Also, slipping in a totally unrelated thing at the end…I've written some new verses to an old song, and am considering the rather typical YouTubeing of myself singing a song.  Interesting idea?  Or just stupid?  Your opinions matter, Internet, even if only to this one lowly IP address!

Peaceful yet Interesting Times,

PD