Ch-ch-ch-changes

Not my biceps (yet).

I’ve been skating for about 4-5 months now. At first it was just once a week (an hour on Sundays), but now I have a regime of two on-skates training sessions and one off-skates fitness session per week. The two on-skate ones are two hours each, plus one has a half-hour of light off-skate fitness. The actual off-skate fitness session is an hour of strength and core work, agility and endurance drills. We do box jumps (hilarious because I am the shortest person in the league and I have to jump boxes that are up to my thighs, and those same boxes are mid-shin for some people), kettlebell workouts (two-handed swings, weird Turkish getup things), ladder runs and a shit load of squats. Pretty much it’s 10 reps of each, in a circuit. Then, there are sit ups, front/side/back planks, push ups, lunges, sprints and god knows what else. Oh, and then on Friday I deadlifted my own body weight. Fuck yeah. And my arms aren't hurting anymore now, either.

One thing that I have noticed is that my body is changing. Not in the pubescent “I’m growing boobs” sense but in the sense that I am actually developing muscles. Or rather, I am getting back the muscles I used to have from serious-hockey-playing days. That’s a welcome return. My thighs are pretty fucking beefy, relative to the rest of my body. My ass is less flabby and bony, and more firm, according to unspecified sources (woohoo, derby booty). I still have stupid T-Rex arms, but doing more weights and push ups will fix that. I think I’m currently the heaviest I’ve ever been (barring poor eating habits at the end of high school due to exam stress), but I’m okay with that because it’s mostly muscle.

And today I saw that I have lines on my back. Like, tone lines, fuck yeah. I would like to get some of those on my front so I don’t have a beer gut. I often measure the amount of fat I have on my stomach by scrunching the fat and skin around my belly button and seeing how big of a butt shape I can make it go in. I know that’s gross, but I was inspired when I saw it once on an episode of Jerry Springer years ago, so go figure. (By the way, I really fucking miss that show.) Happily, the gut-butt I can make now is substantially smaller than it was six months ago. Fuck yeah.

Welcome to Team Pie, where there are at least 1.3 pies per person.

My metabolism is also going kind of crazy. After I skate I am a fucking eating machine. I can inhale a burger and fries like nobody’s business, and after our weeknight skate sessions we sometimes have Team Pie night, which is a bunch of us hanging out in McDonalds and devouring a fuck ton of pies and burgers and attracting the attention and ire of weirdos. Last week at Team Pie I ate three burgers, two things of medium fries, two things of medium Fanta (I hate coke) and half a pie. Fuck. That’s actually kind of disgusting. Plus if Team Pie is a weekly event (which it has been the past month), it’ll soon become Team Bowel Cancer. This week I skipped Team Pie for a slightly healthier option (oven bake fish, oven bake fries, panfried asparagus, chocolate milk). I think it’s about the same volume of food, but I actually feel better the next day about it (both in terms of diminished sluggishness and guilt). If I can eat well and continue working out as much and as hard as I am now, I’m kind of excited to see what my body will look like in another 6 months.