What's Your Most Recent NSV

Yesterday was my birthday and we went out for a fancy dinner with lots of good wine. Thanks to the wine, I was hung over this morning. I had to talk myself into going walking at the high school. I told myself just doing a couple of miles would help clear my head.
I ended up walking just over 7 miles and it was my fastest time yet, 14.32 minutes per mile.
Now it's time for a short nap. :-)

Getting locked out of the house and crawling through the doggy door. Couldn't have done that 8 months ago.

Took a Zumba class today, which I've only done a few times and not recently, mostly because of scheduling--it's not part of my regular workout schedule but it's the kind of thing I throw in when I want to do something on an off-day or I can't do what I had planned for some reason.

In the past I've always felt like if I could just manage to move in the same direction as the instructor most of the time, that was all I could hope for in dropping in on a strange class--forget about getting the steps right! But today, I guess because I've been taking ballet and jazz classes off-and-on over the last couple of years, I found it so easy to pick up on the steps and execute them! It's like my kinesthetic memory and "sight-reading" skills have improved, which is a really cool thing to happen in your 50s.

Plus, during the cool down, there were a lot of movements that essentially were very high-rep body-weight arm exercises (overhead triceps extensions and various shoulder-height bicep, lat, and delt movements), which I know in the past would have had my muscles burning and screaming, and even the instructor dropped her arms a couple of times to rest them, but I guess doing a "heavy" lifting program (New Rules of Lifting for Women) has had an effect on endurance as well as strength, because I could keep up the reps the whole time.

The cool down also had a number of stretching movements that were similar to yoga postures, and I found I was able to do them easily, which, despite having practiced yoga off-and-on since I was an adolescent, I wouldn't have found easy at my top weight.

It's neat to see improvements made in one type of fitness pursuit carry over to another. It made me happy to see differences in so many areas compared to where I was a couple of years ago.