Physical activity

[davidn]

It hasn't escaped my notice that over the last while, my school friends on Facebook have all become worryingly active. While I continue to live the sedentary lifestyle of a dual career/hobbyist coder, they're getting into tracksuits and cycling a hundred miles around the Scottish highlands.

And at work, I don't feel any less lazy by comparison to anyone around me. One of the other coders regularly does 50-kilometre runs, presumably thought up by people who thought that marathons were for wimps. And two of the other people I work with participated in a triathlon today - a five-kilometre run, long distance bike ride and a swim across a lake infested with ravenous goldfish. One of them said he didn't even know how to swim, but was confident that he could just pick it up as he went along.

I've never really felt motivated to take part in much exercise - I've been very fortunate to just have a constitution that seemed to allow me to just stay in acceptable shape no matter how little I moved about or how many biscuits I ate (getting a terrible illness every couple of years has tended to help as well). But during my last physical checkup at the doctor, she told me that my BMI had crept into the "overweight" range for the first time, and seeing the list of medical problems on your card as "Hypothyroidism; a bit fat"... it tends to make you think that you should do something about it.

Not that I really did, until Whitney restarted her own exercise routine. Given the chance to support each other, we went to the local gym together for the first time this morning - and I have to say that I think forty minutes of exercise came closer to killing me than a diet of chips ever has. I was listening to my own music while on the elliptical treadmill, so that I can tell you that I lasted almost exactly sixteen minutes and twenty seconds before collapsing into a nondescript blubbery heap.

I think that I started off too confidently, though - I naively expected that I would be able to move my legs about for a practically infinite amount of time as long as I kept my pace to an acceptable level. Instead, I'm going to try the couch-to-5K plan, which I remember being highly recommended a while ago - with the promise of being able to proceed only when comfortable, I think that the idea of incremental 'rewards' and a level-based structure will do wonders for my motivation.

Comments

[kjorteo]

I think I'm the one who recommended C25K to you. It worked wonders for me! These days, you've seen how I once did a half-marathon and ran the whole thing despite severe injuries, and under more normal circumstances, I run a little less than three miles (three laps around my apartment complex' outer track, which is calculated to be something like 0.9 miles per lap) as just part of my normal exercise routine, three times a week. This was all after several false starts around my college years, wherein I was an idiot who didn't really understand the whole "if you go from zero to killing yourself on the very first workout, you're just going to injure yourself within a week and then stop again." C25K is what finally brought me to this level!

Unfortunately, I have a bit less to say on the subject of motivation; clearly mine is fine, but that's because I have the prurient ulterior motivation that maintaining a lithe Final Fantasy villain frame just happens to appeal to me, as does the fact that hitting that rough dirt-with-rocks track barefoot regularly toughens my feet at the same time it does all the regular calorie burning and fitness enhancing and whatnot. Obviously, this kind of motivation works great for me (the latter especially,) though I can't exactly think of a way to make it relevant to you ... so, yes, level-based structure progression, let's go with that. :)

[davidn]

I thought that might have been the one that you did! A couple of other people at work have since mentioned it as well. What I think I need the most is some instruction on how well I'm expected to be able to perform at each stage of the process, and a guide on how to gradually... I don't want to use the term "level up", but... numbers and lists help me. For example, I can't believe that more people don't use the bug tracker for solo projects at work - without that, they can't constantly go and look at what they've done to the graph.

I had forgotten how extraordinarily painful just reading that post was. I still don't know whether it was massively inadvisable or massively impressive that you either started or finished. Perhaps both!

[kjorteo]

Probably both! I got myself into that mess through a stunning lack of foresight, and got myself back out again through almost heroic levels of sheer not-going-to-let-this-stop-me determination. I mean, I had the "okay, yeah, that one is really bad, I'm probably going to need medical attention after this" reaction with over three miles to go, and the combination of wanting to finish strong and the realization that said medical attention was probably located back at the finishing point anyway led me to just shrug and keep going.

Anyway, if you need reasonable bite-sized goals to ease you from, well, couch to 5k, or just the sense of having a series of levels to climb, then C25K is a good plan!

[ethelfleda.livejournal.com]

It's getting something you like. Personally I loathe running, but am very happy dancing/fighting/on the gym weights :)

[davidn]

Fighting... what, exactly - overly boorish medical students? :)

If you remember my fame on the DDR machine in university - I actually have a pad for it in the basement office, though I haven't used it a whole lot since the operation. And it's good to have somewhere that Whitney and I can go together to support each other in our efforts!