Um.... fitness?

Oh dear. I did it again.

The problem, really, is that I didn't just blow off updating this blog but I blew off working on my health, too. I have many excuses of course, but they're not getting me very far.

So what brings me back? Well, I'm frankly too pale of liver to run in this weather (it's been below freezing where I am for quite a while now) but I have been back at the weights. Lifting small baby weights in the basement before work, but I'll take it.

Christmas had brought with it the breaking point, as far as weight is concerned: that moment where you have to concede that yes, you have gained quite a lot of weight and no, it is not better than it seems. It's pretty bad. In the first few weeks of 2015 I lost what felt like quite a lot of weight: about nine pounds! Unfortunately the piper must be paid and my weight is now stubbornly sticking to the same mark with not much movement in sight. My dreams of getting to 200lbs by June are mostly in tatters. We'll see.

Until then I'm battling on, looking to control the diet and keep the weights up. I love weights. Many men do. It fulfills a macho desire to exercise in a manly confident way while also not feeling all that hard. That's the problem of course; it should be hard. My experience with weights is mixed. I get positive results fairly quickly but I don't push myself as far as I could. A friend once took me to the gym and marveled at how quickly my arms just stopped working. To be fair, dips are tough when you're lifting over 200lbs of body weight.

At the moment I'm walking around work with arms and legs twitching with that odd sensation between pain and the feeling your limbs have in the seconds after you get out of bed a little earlier than planned. I love it, undeniable proof that I have done something to my body, and seeing as how my body has been making me feel bad for so long, I hope that something is profoundly negative. I have an odd approach to exercise in this way. I consider my body something separate from myself, and I hate it. I need it to live but otherwise I want it to suffer. This has typically been an effective strategy for exercising too, though it's undermined by my love of chocolate.

Speaking of which, I am off chocolate, as I am every year at this time. I'm currently craving everything, but for today I'll leave you with an image of a food item I spent about three minutes uninterrupted standing in front of this evening in the grocery store before accepting this was a sign of my desperation more than any actual desire to eat the damn thing.
Three minutes. That wasn't an exaggeration.

Outdoorsy(ish)

Part of the reason I feel inspired to write a blog about my slow moves towards actual human fitness is that I’m hopeful it will help motivate me. I’m not a natural athlete. I love a number of sports, in particular soccer, but my love has only caused me pain, my disenfranchised intellect looking on as my body failed utterly to accomplish what it knew needed to be done. Not the physical type, really. At all.

I am, in addition to a lack of sporting skill, the type identified by Jim Gaffigan as “indoorsy.” Funnily enough, this extends to my exercise as well. I quite like weights, particularly once I realized that the fact I don’t lift very heavy weights isn’t necessarily a bad thing (at least not to start with), and I’ve always done plenty of cardio indoors. Most recently, I’ve been running indoors. Runners tell me they hate running indoors but I don’t mind it. It’s a track, I run on it, I listen to podcasts, the timer beeps and I stop. Done. I’ve always been able to click into a disturbingly Orwellian sense of hopelessness in my exercise and it helps to pass the time. I’ve mostly lost the fire of my early 20s, when I lost about forty pounds by listening to heavy metal and actively waging war against my own body. Nowadays I’m not as prone to wage war by running across a battlefield or staging advances across my own expansive flank. I set up shop and wait it out. It takes longer but it works.

This morning I decided to try something different. I have hit a bit of a lull in exercising, partly due to tiredness from work and home and partly to the unexpected setback of gaining weight after overeating and drinking alcohol for a week. So I got to work and didn’t even give myself a chance to chicken out; I immediately headed off on an outdoors run. To make things more interesting, I dropped the music and went without distractions. This also meant to time for the run, but I wasn’t worried about that. I mostly wanted to do a run close to (or in the end slightly shorter than) my recent work-outs outdoors and see how it went.

Hills, what’s the deal with those? Downhill slopes, no matter how gradual or how brief, feel like a gift from the divine. God above has taken mercy on me, an idiot that has is trying to improve his health by shuffling around and calling it running on his blog. He gave me this; He GAVE it to me: a downhill!!! Oh my God, I love downhill slopes. Love them.

From whence has this love suddenly sprung? Of course, it comes from the sheer hell of running uphill. I actually have uphill preferences. I don’t mind relatively steep slopes too much because I get into the challenge until near the peak, when it becomes one big fiesta of self-loathing and acid reflux. No, it’s the gradual slopes I can’t stand, the ones that never actually become even close to what this beginner could credibly claim as being challenging. It’s the humiliation. Not humiliation in front of other people. I don’t care about that though I did find myself speeding up more than I thought possible to overtake two walkers this morning; no, I’m talking about the indefensible impact of my complete and utter lack of fitness.

At the heart of the whole experience, of course, lay what I guess runners call The Wall? I didn’t think I’d really encounter The Wall, though it’s entirely possible that’s because I’ve basically been gently bumping my head against it for weeks now. I encountered it this morning though. I always thought The Wall was something you hit and then got through a minute or so later. I guess I don’t know what I thought; I hit the wall approximately 500 metres after I started running and didn’t get past it until just after the two mile mark.

Once I got past it though! The pain just lifted. I had pain down the back of my calves the whole run (I’m long since past the point of worrying about these things; I could probably warm up more effectively but I think it’s mostly my brain using every dirty trick it can think of to get me to stop and drive to a McDonald’s immediately) but the bigger issue had been the fact that I was breathing like a drowning man the whole way with my entire cardio-vascular system screaming at me as loud as it could. This just lifted, and suddenly I was in a very strange space indeed, mentally…

I was enjoying my run.

This is an important statement. Firstly, I was enjoying myself. Not enduring it, or willing it to end by thinking of all the cheeseburgers I was going to eat this weekend, I was enjoying it. Secondly, I was RUNNING. Not at a particularly great pace (I’d guess about 10:45/mile based on previous experience) but running nonetheless. I even broke out into a couple of faster runs, down under 9:00/mile I would think. Those didn’t last long but they existed.

All of this comes down to some surprising solutions:

• I can run outdoors and not die.
• I can actually run stronger at the end of a 2.6 mile run than at the start. This bodes well for the first 5k.
• I enjoy running without music or podcasts. 

The last one might have been the most surprising of all. I’ve run outdoors before and so, if anything, was perhaps a little disappointed at how much of a struggle I had today. I’ve always been a big believer in music or podcasts to distract me from the exercise though. Today was different. I quite liked thinking aloud to myself, even if a lot of this became begging myself to continue. I thought about work a little, and I looked around. Checked out the park. It was nice. Outdoorsy.

Intervals

I ran intervals this morning, for several reasons. I was tired, for one thing. I weighed myself, which turned out to be a mistake. Well, at the very least it was demoralizing. Perhaps it wasn’t a mistake as much as it was a hurtful dose of reality. I really would prefer to eat chocolate more or less all the time, hence the name of the blog. I also wouldn’t mind a liberal allowance of fried chicken dinners and beer. Such is life, however. I have excuses, sure. Many excuses. New father, busy period at work, and so on and so on. If I’m going to get even remotely serious here though, I have to exert some form of common sense when it comes to the diet.

I also had a more general interest in trying intervals. In the end, I might have been a little too conservative: I “ran” for thirty minutes though it included walking to warm up and walking to warm down. The intervals came in one minute bursts of walking and jogging alternating. Overall it was nice though I may have been better off keeping the intensity low but running for longer. I felt in great shape during the jogging intervals and there’s no question the recent running has strengthened my endurance.

Ultimately however, it was probably a good idea. I was thrilled to get back up to thirty minutes of uninterrupted running a week in the last month, but I’ve been a little nervous about overdoing it.

I’m at a slightly frustrating point in this whole exercise where I feel in between different stages. I’m not really in decent enough shape (or close to it) to take on a 5k aggressively, but going back to the start of a couch to 5k programme feels like a backward step. Part of the problem, or really most of the problem, is that I feel in between all kinds of things. I’m overweight but not to the point where running isn’t an option yet. I can run but not all that fast. I can push myself to go for reasonable amounts of time (thirty to forty minutes without walking) but my speed is… less than impressive.

Perhaps I’m guilty of not giving myself enough credit for getting started in the first place. Mostly I think I miss my Nike+ data, as rudimentary as it was. I’m already counting the days to getting up and running with the new watch. How primitive a being am I that a machine registering another mile on the clock makes me feel accomplished, while I write off genuine improvements in my stamina as minor steps on the road.

Rest Day

Rest day. A day of rest. A day of my legs twinging at me all day, it seems.

I “cross trained” on Saturday, by which I mean that I moved around a bit and it wasn’t a run. I played kickball actually. It was a great relief when a colleague confided to me yesterday that he, too, was “feeling it.”

It was particularly satisfying as this statement was uttered with the full intent of soliciting solidarity. No 80s pain and gain dichotomy for us, no; just the grim realization that a few minutes of kicking a ball and some mildly competent base running had activated muscles I’m not sure I’ve used since before selfies became a thing.  Now, a day later still, I’m walking around with oddly starched feeling leg muscles. Yesterday’s run was… not great. I’m back on the stats game soon and I can’t wait, though sometimes we should count our blessings. Not convinced I broke twelve minutes per mile yesterday.

In any case, I’m back in the saddle tomorrow regardless. Things have hit a slight lull, but I must persevere! Thirty minutes without stopping or walking is still a big deal and I can’t let that go. 

Training up to catch the fitness wagon

I'm back!

Yes, yes. It's been a while. Real life and work and all those things.

A recap of my, um, fitness regimen recently:

I stopped running at the end of November 2013. In the weeks previous, I had greatly improved my ability to run, even getting to a point where I was running a 5 kilometres three times a week. Now, I wasn't running very fast: my record for a 5k remained just under 34 minutes (these are all from my own runs, I've yet to run a competitive 5k). I was doing it however. Completing it. Feeling better. Running harder, bit by bit.

Christmas came, and with it all the wonderful food and unhealthy drinks that one associates with Santa Claus and lengthy visits home to Ireland. January brought its usual vacuum of motivation and in February we had a little boy.

The little boy is fantastic, but unbeknownst to him he was giving me a wonderful excuse not to exercise.

Well, things change, and I just started my fourth week back running. I run three times a week and am now running for half an hour each time after building back up. Some days are better than others, but it's a clear improvement. I'm getting a fancy sports watch soon and with that I am stepping up to crazy concepts like timing myself, "competing" in organized races and working long-term towards......

A triathlon.

I must stress, long term. First off, I need to lose some weight and get to a point where I can actually run a decent 5k before moving on to other goals. I don't see myself completing a sprint triathlon in 2014, but I would very much like to complete one in the spring of 2015. Here we go. It's happening.

Inspiration is a funny thing. Mine remains strong: I want to drink beer and eat chocolate. However I know deep down, and in truth not all that deep down at all, that this journey will change me. It's no coincidence that my long history of falling off the fitness wagon has an interlapping history, an opposing waveform in fact, of jumping gleefully on to the beer wagon. The one with chocolate wheels. And axels of fried chicken. It's some vehicle, this contraption of my imagination.

So I may become one of those weirdos I don't understand, someone that eats healthily and seems okay with it. Far more likely though, I think, is that I'll become something else: someone that loves to eat and drink all kinds of terrible things but postpones the fun because "I have a run/ride/swim in the morning." I'll be okay with being that guy. I'm a father now after all, and laughing off various medical warnings (regardless how slight) is suddenly considerably more selfish than it once was. Here we go!

I don't have a good reason for including the picture above, other than to point out it is the most recent chocolate I have consumed. Some run to improve their health. Some run to raise money for people who have fallen ill or on hard times. Some people run because they want to prove something to themselves, to others, to the world. Some run because they are really into that awful motivational house music that people play at gyms. I run so I can eat chocolate.

I broke from precedent today and did something sensible. I started slow. I've never actually started slow. All of my previous attempts to get into running hit a pretty significant wall. I'm not talking about THE WALL that runners go on about, as I usually hit that in under a minute of moving faster than a leisurely stroll. I'm talking about getting to a point where you are done. Just done. No more running for you. I always get there. I used to get there thanks to niggling injuries. I have been lucky recently, and I've been using shoes for over a year that seem to suit me better, but really I needed to do what countless online articles and even one random stranger on my Nike Plus account advised me to do: start slow.

So I have done. I downloaded running guide podcasts from The Guardian. I put in my earphones. I walked for a bit, ran for a minute, walked for a minute and a half and repeated it for half an hour. Even though I covered barely half the distance of my previous run, a slog characterized by my trademark swift slouching while trying not to cry interspersed with lone survivor of sneak Viet Cong attack paced trundling, I felt great. I had those wonderful endorphins running through me and I felt both tired and good, simultaneously. I understand this is how things are supposed to feel. 

I don't actually like running, you see. I like it when the running's over. I'm the same way with writing. I'm vampiric really, except that I have to create something from which to suck the energy. Thus, exercise and writing and anything that feels remotely "productive." My two mile walk with some 60 second jogs in the middle felt productive though. Let's go with that for now.

My first lapse...

... Hopefully not of many.

Lapsing is what I do, when it comes to exercise. But I got myself up and running again this week. Pun intended. I've also started weights up again, so let's see where it goes from here.

Things I've learned this week:

I need a walking break per mile of jogging.

I like weight machines (I hadn't used one in quite some time).

Indoor running tracks are awful, at least for weak minded folk like myself. Each lap brings another opportunity to give up.

I'm sticking with it though. If only for the milkshakes and the ice cream and everything else.