I’ve had a lot going on in the last few days and I haven’t really known what to write.  On the one hand, now that the cat’s out of the bag, I don’t have to be concerned about my boss finding out about my plans. Yesterday and today, too, have been significant in that realm — I’ve told three co-workers who I felt it’s important that they know from me, and early.
So that’s good. I’ve also had an intense weekend. I went without caffeine and I have never had a worse migraine in my life. Monday was an entirely unproductive day at work, but it made me realize, how much I dislike being dependent on a chemical.  So I’m staying off coffee. I am tempering my detox though with matcha and green tea. I know these have caffeine in it, but after the headaches I need to at least reduce those or I wont be functional at work. It seems inappropriate to replace one chemical (caffeine) with another (pain killers). So I’m using green tea and matcha, but no coffee to try to taper off coffee. I would like to get to a point where I can enjoy a cup — even decaf — and not get into the habit of a daily coffee.
Why on earth did I do this now? Because one of my friends needed study participants and this was the weekend I was to do the testing.  It was interesting for me because I ended up getting an estimate of my VO2 Max. What exactly is my VO2 max? From a google search:
“VO2 Max is a measure of how fit an athlete is: It expresses the volume of oxygen a body consumes per minute”
It’s an interesting range to know, and it helps me to know where my heart rate needs to be for peak training. For those women who want to burn more fat than carbs when working out?? I know where I need to work at, for me, to do this.  In my case, I probably had more of a VO2 peak — the test I was given was on a bike and I’m a runner, so my tester said it’s probably safe to add on 3-4 more to my results if I were to test while running. The reason is, my legs gave out before I reached my breathing capacity. I just couldn’t pedal anymore, faster or harder.
What VO2 max ranges are normal for people of different ages? This information was provided in a table in the website I linked to, above. I’ll include it here as an image for reference. All citations and credits are to be given to preventdisease.com and should not be directed to me:

So what was my number? Mine was 42 which puts me in the ‘very good’ category, or perhaps higher if I’d been tested on a treadmill. This is a number that has me pretty proud of myself. It feels like an empirical number that I can say ‘I’m this fit’. I may not have a perfect body, I may eat too much chocolate on occasion (like tonight), but I am quite fit and that is a great way to look at things beyond the scale or how I feel (which is entirely subjective!).
So yeah, those are some thoughts going around in my head. For now I’m going to sleep being thankful, once again, for the AC unit I now have in my bedroom. I must say if this heatwave keeps up I’m going to have one organized bedroom!