The Break-up

Dear my Rut,

I decided to write this letter to you because I have no idea how else to get through to you…how else to get you to listen to me calmly without interruption and without becoming irrational.  I know you are defensive.  I know that by nature you can't see your flaws...your mistakes, or how your behavior effects me and everyone around us.  I really want you to hear me and understand where I am coming from.

I don’t understand why you have been treating me in the manner you have been lately.  None of my actions towards you have warranted the disdain that I feel every moment you are around.   I don't ask for much.  I just want to wake up and have the motivation to go run, make breakfast, brew coffee, go to work and do a decent job (decent enough to keep me hired I suppose) and leave with the kind of mentality I need to go train.  Why do you want to take that away from me?

You are CONSTANTLY around complaining that you're too tired, it's too hot, you didn't eat correctly the day before or drink enough water.  I've grown weary of you Rut.  I'm tired of you keeping me home lying on the couch or napping in the middle of the day.  I can't stand how you stop me from doing the things that I LIKE you always want to do the things that make YOU happy.  I don't WANT to skip cardio to get a smoothie Rut, I don't WANT to drive ALL the way to the gym TWICE in one day just to walk in turn around and leave because you think you're needs are more important than mine and you just NEEDED to run menial errands RIGHT at that moment.  I don't WANT to set my alarm DAILY for 0500 JUST to have you roll over and re-set it for 0700.  I CERTAINLY do NOT  want to waste the time and money getting all dressed up for a nice day outside sweating and smiling JUST to have you decide that you want to update your Facebook status.

Rut I KNOW that I'm human and I get tired and I lose sight of why I want to train but I don't need YOU trying to boss me around and tell me what to do and when to do it.  I'm not going to let you control this relationship anymore.  All you are going to do is run it into the ground and make me hate myself and more so hate you.  You've had your time in the sunshine Rut.  You're 15 minutes of fame is over.  I'm sorry you have to hear it like this but I'm done with you.  I wish you the best but I'm sorry to say the next person you are with is not going to benefit from your influence and to that I can only wish them speedy realization that you don't make decisions.  Imma' show YOU how great I am! 

Fuck off Rut I'm OUT!

Love,

Katya

With a Capital 'T"

Hey Monday we are not friends!  Those closest to me know about my minor emotional breakdown I had on Saturday night which led me to the misbehavior I participated in on Sunday...vodka , oj and 8 hour energies and what SOME can call a minor incident of breaking and entering but I left my born to run book somewhere and I had to get it back!  Anyways these things are NOT the best idea when you are crabby pants.  I don't advocate drinking...I don't even really drink that often or that much and to be fair I had one mason jar of the concoction Frank Nicholson made me for a photo shoot, and was blitzed by noon trying to participate in Spartan Race radio chat...not my finest moment (sorry Shawty, Mscan and Jim). 

I am a firm believer in consequences so today I was in trouble.  Monday we are not friends.  Dumb bell split squat cleans were invented by Satan...I am quite certain of it and shortly after drafting up those little gems Satan paced around for a minute or two and decided that his next great idea would be burpee dumb bell squat clean and presses...yay....booo...  So here is what went down:

                5 rounds for time:

                15 dumb bell split squat cleans(20#)

                12 burpee squat clean and press(20#)

                9 wall ball shots (20#)

                400m sprint

                9 wall ball shots (20#)

                12 burpee DB squat clean and press (20#)

                15 dumb bell split squat cleans (20#)

I have had some amazingly awful ideas...one of which was the catalyst for this event but man...when I have a bad one I have a BAD one.  There was an actual moment when I thought "uh...srsly Katya its fine you can just ask all your friends to punch you in the throat it will be MUCH better and more than likely a LOT faster."   

These such actions have made me QUITE certain that I need constant supervision indefinitely.  I am no longer capable of making my own decisions so whomever feels up to the task of being in charge of me I am accepting applications IMMEDS!!!

This one is short as I feel like something a homeless liberal peed on.  Heed my warning friends...it's not worth the trouble.

***TIP of the DAY***

Dried woodland mushrooms...stay far far away from them...they are NOT a good idea...you can't even chew them i have NO idea what they are used for but it is NOT salad.

Dear Regs...

Good grief my barn is dusty.  I need to remedy that at some point today.  You all can go ahead and take bets on whether or not it will happen I will give you the over under (no I don't know what that means I don't gamble I just hear people say it on TV).

I wanted to talk to the regular people today.  I was going to hold off on this one because I don't want to come off as a person who floats around life picking out the flaws of everyone else.  I am WAY better at illustrating my own flaws as you will see in time, but this topic has for a long time always rubbed me slightly the wrong way.  Not to say that I don't understand the intention but man...it's the delivery.  Now...when I say I would like to talk to the regular people I am referring to the marshmallows, the skinny fats, the sedimentary.  I am fairly certain none of the people who read my nonsense are any of those things...I can pretty much stake my life or my shoe collection on it (I like shoes) so I don't think I will be offending anyone.

TO my point...backhanded or backwards compliments...good grief.  I am aware of my stature trust me.  I know that you may not believe me "you don't see what you look like walking around in cut off shirts at the Giant" (thanks SP no WONDER I stopped dating you...idiot) yes I do.  "I bet you have no idea how crazy you look carrying that sand bag around do you?" yes I do.  I know that very few of my shirts have sleeves and I dress in a manner that if at any moment I were to be attacked I would be able to effectively run away...or Brabo choke someone.  I really think though that people forget that I am in fact a girl and that AS a girl there are certain adjectives that we just don't want to hear NO MATTER the intent. 

I don't want to walk into the Outback, where I go every Friday night for my dose of barely cooked red meat and steamed vegetable medley, and hear from one of the waitresses (I know them all...not by name but I go there a lot):

"You're looking really bulky!"

BULKY!!!!! WHAT?!?!?! YES I know what she meant but it's like knowing a foreign language.  You hear it said than you have to translate it in your head to get the meaning there is a split second where you are lost in translation. 

There was a day no to long ago where I walked into the man cave section of my globo gym and a woman who clearly had gotten lost on her way to Zumba exclaimed:

"You look HUGE!"

You're kidding me right.  Maybe....MAYBE if some obvi roided-meat-head-body builder (oh snap four word hyphenate!) had said that to me I would have been less stung by it but this chick was girly she should have known better.

"You're like...full sized"

To this I just said eff it and adopted as my own personal self assessment since I was called that on more than one occasion I decided it was fated.

"Well since you obviously aren't afraid of getting jacked you should do full grip pull-ups they SHRED your forearms"

I don't even know...

"Yea but you're NOT a girl so I figured it was OK"

NO no no Bobby...I am a girl I promise...I will give you the contact information of my waxer she can provide gender confirmation.

Now again...I know that none of these things were meant to startle me and I honestly am not offended by these descriptors, but that in and of itself leads me to believe that I may now just be de-sensitized.  None of the things people say will ever change my attitude towards training.  I don't train to look a specific way.  My body structure is a byproduct or side effect of things that I like to do and I don't plan on making adjustments.  So yes I'm " built like a line backer", have a "really broad back for a girl" and  walk around on my "tree trunks"...but I make this sh** look good so take a moment, regular people, and think about your delivery...thanks me and everyone like me appreciates it.

***TIP-O-THE-DAY***

1 bag of frozen chicken (2#)

1 can of salsa

1 can of black beans

1 can of tomatos

3 chopped jalapenos

1 chopped onion

cilantro

crop pot on low before bed and you will wake up to prepped food for the day BOOM!!!

7 minutes in crazy

So the definition of crazy is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different result correct? (kind of like my dating habits…BOOM!!) So what is the word that is defined as doing the same crazy thing repeatedly knowing that there will be no different results? I spent a decent amount of time…OK not decent but 30 minutes…yesterday trying to summon a word for my current state of motion which to me, would have been summed up by this mystery word that I am not privy to knowing.  I was about 7 minutes into a 30 AMRAP (as many rounds as possible) work out of 6X G2O with 95# (tune in tomorrow for the addition of a glossary and abbreviations page), 12 X wall ball (16#) and 24 X double-unders when I realized quite to my surprise and dismay that what I was doing was horrible and I still had to keep doing it for 23 more minutes.  It was really deceptive this little ditty.  It looked all cute and stuff written down on my piece of paper.  Nothing that only took up three lines on my lined ledger could POSSIBLY hurt my feelings, or my legs…I made it 33 hours into the Death Race for Pete’s sake! Sure enough though I was genuinely considering revising the definition of the word crazy…or mmkn (again…glossary) stupid. There is something to be said for pushing through something and completing a goal and blah blah blah but honestly I had already rucked with 50# for 30 minutes (who are we kidding it was 20 minutes) and done some front squats and split squats and really wanted nothing more than to justify my way out of the full 30 minutes.  “I haven’t eaten anything in a while” “It’s hot outside…not here in the globo but out there through the window above which is housed the AC vent…its hot” “The smoothie chick just got back from her break and she may be leaving soon and how will I get the specialized smoothie that I force them to make me that is not only nowhere even close to anything on the menu but comprised of things that, in their eyes, should never go together in a blender”  By 7 minutes I knew what the outcome of this dastardly plan was going to be and yet I continued…I think that is WAY less sane then thinking it was going to have a different conclusion. 

Dear Webster,

 You will be getting an email from me.

Love,

Katya

***I have decided to add a tip of the day.  Todays tip:  be friends with your crock pot.  Make 6 days worth of steel cut oats in your crock pot and portion it out into tupperware and put in the fridge.  Steel cut oats cook in 2 minutes in the microwave while you're adding coffee to your powdered coffeemate.  Breakfast for lazies..a.k.a. me... Done and Done.

Convenient

There are a few things that I am “over” today.  One of them being RFIs but the most prevalent is what I have decided to dedicate this soliloquy to, as it was presented to me in a semi-diatribic (oooh yea making up words on the spot) conversation I had with a person who elicited my advice today.  Things went down like this:

“You have to tell me what it is you eat.  I can’t get a good handle on my diet”

“I would be happy to help you!”

Ask ANY of the chicks in my office and they will tell you that for as long as they were interested ( which was about 3 weeks) I had them fill out a spreadsheet of their daily intake, would make comments and suggestions and while on the plan they all lost weight but then got bored and stopped.

“Eating well is actually a lot simpler than you would think!”

“Well give me some examples of what you eat during the day?”

“I eat frequently during the day small meals consisting of a little protein fibrous not starchy carbs and a small amount of mono or poly unsaturated fats.  For example for lunch yesterday I had some basil baked chicken a few almonds and steamed spinach”

“OH honey I don’t have the time to do all that I just eat what is convenient”

Fully annoyed that I had just wasted 3 minutes of my lunch break I looked at this person and said:

“What exactly is convenient? I have a lot of pens sitting on my desk that are convenient but I’m not going to eat them. It doesn’t seem CONVENIENT to drive to Arby’s and stand in line (our Arby’s doesn’t have a drive through) order something drive all the way back and eat it in your car…”

***look of distaste and mulling verbal attack about to be directed at my face***

“Some of us have home lives, children, a family and priorities and don’t have time to spend hours a day cooking for ourselves so that we have a good meal to take to work.”

Even when said in an attempted jovial manner…this did not sit well in my ears.

***abrupt end of conversation***

So…not ONLY has this person now made me feel bad about myself for being single and childless but they have also made it QUITE apparent to me that people are in fact idiots and have NO idea how to utilize their kitchen facilities in an effective and dynamic manner.  I have timed myself.  I can prepare and ENTIRE meal for two people in less than 15 minutes.  Not some shitty thrown together mess of a meal, but rosemary and balsamic reduced chicken, asparagus, sautéed spinach with heirloom tomatoes, red onions, and spaghetti squash…from scratch (or raw) to plated less than 15 minutes.  It’s not hard.  I find it difficult to believe that gen pop is SO void of creativity…or possibly organization.  I mean you put raw meat in a pan and bake it…you don’t have to stand over a fire and ward off wild life while it cooks you go update your Facebook status or according to this broad like…spend time with your kid.  I am inherently lazy ask ANYONE.  I have a short attention span and do NOT like performing menial housewifery tasks such as cooking and cleaning.  The LAST thing I want to do is spend “hours a day cooking for ourselves” eff off lady don’t ask me for advice if you are going to give me excuses as you why you can’t do what I say.  Now thanks to the time I have wasted trying to educate you on the joys of eating to live forever I will have to switch to lunch option number two: steak, steamed green beans and mushrooms…less than 5 minutes…AT WORK…get out of my face...I'm going to go dead lift something terrible now.

Is This Thing On?

I'm not sure what I'm doing at this exact moment and I'm hoping it comes to be gracefully and smoothly, maybe in my sleep or while I'm strolling in a park (I never do that).  More than likely clarity like all of my bright ideas, will hit me like Ike (too soon?) while I'm driving in NOVA traffic or in the middle of a meeting where I am SUPPOSED to be talking about NATO or IG's or whatever the Tiger contract is...yea I don't know either but it's a thing we talk about in meetings.  I digress...honestly you should all get pretty used to that.  I go off on tangents often and my favorite punctuation is "...".

I have been trying to figure out what I want this blog to be about.  My for lifsies bestie, Sarah (learn her name I will probs talk about her a lot), told me I need to have it focus on the things that people ask me about the most often.  The things that people are most interested in when it comes to me is "what do you eat" and "what is it you like...do" ( I usually take that to mean physically no one really cares about my professional activities ) so I suppose until I become completely redundant and boring I will do just that. 

I have little to no experience blogging.  I wrote a blog for a few months "The Glamazons take on the peak Death Race" mmkn ( ahh you will also find that throughout the course of my writing I will implement rando Russian and Arabic words into my everyday English jargon...just use context clues and you should be OK) you've heard of it? Yes? NO? I mean We (Laura Loo a.k.a. Glamazon West) had like 30 followers we were KIND of a big deal. AHHH but my point is I'm a novice at this feel free to critique but know that I will pout if you're mean to me.

I SUPPOSE I should start with why I so narcissistically think that ANYONE cares to read ANYTHING that I say.  Which I have learned in Blog-spoke, translates into writing my bio.  I'm not that spectacular.  I'm in fact pretty average and borderline boring.  I was  flighty kid tried a bunch of stuff growing up mostly at the forced hand of Paula (mom) and mostly things that I didn't really care to try but they "made me a well rounded person".  Oddly enough none of them were sports.  I have always been pretty haphazard and slightly misguided and that continued into my late teens early 20's when I graduated high school and decided not to make anything of myself for a few years and bask in the joys of being able to get into local bars at age 19.  This did not bode all that well for me and by the time I turned 21 I realized something had to give or I was going to end up pretty useless.  Enter the United States Marine Corps.  I enlisted at the hand of my Father Capt Michael A. McCabe USNR on Oct. 10 2001 and started my ever so glamorous career as a Russian Cryptologic Linguist and Signal Intelligence Analyst (12 years and I still used spell check to spell intelligence).  Contrary to popular belief it is QUITE possible to get VERY out of shape in the Marine Corps...I'm POSITIVE I just got myself into a lot of trouble by saying that but it's true.  By the time I was nicely nestled into my BN I was hovering in the 200# range.  NO one believes it and I always get "but you're tall" or "you carried it really well" FYI gen pop...NEITHER of those turns of phrase are complimentary but I appreciate the sentiment of trying to still make me feel good about it.  With all honesty I totally OWN my former chub rock status it made me who I am today so I embrace is and I still get a kick out of the looks on people's faces when I tell them "HELL no I wasn't born this way".   GEEEZE this is getting long huh sorry it's the first one bear with me...or is it bare with me...no idea. 

As I stated and will re-state a lot I'm a dabbler.  When I was introduced to the gym and told that eating a package of cheese filled hot dogs a night at 2am heavily inebriated was NOT in fact the best way to live forever (main goal) I did a figure competition and won then another and lost and quickly cane to the realization that I wasn't a HUGE fan of that genre of sports activity.  There is something to be said for heart and digging deep to find something in you that will render you triumphant.  Enter Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I could write an epic poem about BJJ.  there is NO better therapy that I can think of than that sport.  You are LITERALLY unable to focus on anything else in your life other than NOT getting choked out or NOT getting your arms broken...it's fantastic. I still hold a special place in my heart for BJJ it opened doors for me.  CrossFit doors, kettle bell doors, Olympic lifting doors.  These new doors opened more doors.  Mountain biking doors, snowboarding doors, adventure and obstacle racing doors, sports nutrition doors, Barn facility doors, Spartan doors, Simple Fuel doors and the doors of all of the abso fantastic people that have gotten me to where I am right now...which to you all may be quite insignificant but to me it just where I want to be.

To be frank ...or billy, the best way to learn all of the things that you care to know about me is to pay attention.  I'm not hard to read, I wear my emotions on my face ( a phrase I never understood as where ELSE would I ware them and if I DID wear the elsewhere how would people know when I am annoyed with them?) and I will d o my best to verbally explain the day to day Katya.  If you get nothing else out of what I write you will at least laugh once or twice if at ANYTHING my spelling and firm grasp on grammar.