Your life is easy

Your nine to five job where you get to wake up an hour and a half early, do your workout, and be set is so pathetically easy, I’m disgusted by you. You don’t know the meaning of chaos. You don’t know what it means to land in a city at midnight, need to start set up the next morning at 7:30, and need to leave a half hour after your job is over to catch an airplane in the next city. You never had to split the one and a half hour yoga exercise into two, with forty minutes in the morning before 7:30, and the other slammed into your hour lunch break somewhere before showering and eating. Good for you that you’re up to Day 60 and can keep up with the pull up routine in a way I’m nowhere close to. You don’t know what a hard schedule is. You don’t know how hard it is.

Or maybe you do. Maybe I’m not that different. Maybe we all have it hard in our own separate ways and I’m just making excuses.

Yeah. It’s probably the latter.

 

This Gym thing is awesome

I like P90X. Don’t get me wrong. I’m too cheap and too busy and never in one place long enough for a gym to make sense. On the other end, attempting to work out on my own is an equally fruitless activity that ends in destroyed knees, and ankles, with nothing to show for it but the former ability to run 6 or more miles straight, and not much else.

With that said, I used a hotel gym today, and it was awesome. I can barely do pull ups, so having machines where I can do the equivalent of a pull up if I weighed 140 pounds was incredible. I discovered if I weighed 30 pounds less, I’d have no problems with them.

I could push myself harder in the gym with the machines in combination with the order of exercises that P90X does for arms and back.

I learned something. After this is all over I have no choice but to join a gym.

Gross.

 

Packing Exercise Clothes for Travel

This metafilter discussion thread is the best I found on what to where when exercising while traveling. Short answer? Quick Dri from Nike, or some similar synthetic material is perfect. My current state of 10 cotton shirts, all of which will be disgusting by the end of the trip is unsustainable. Carry on only including exercise clothes, a band, a projector, and a laptop for 10 days straight is no easy task.

Admit you’re impressed.

 

Day 22. Defining Success

Not a photo of me.

Yesterday doing Kenpo I reached a state of flow. My mind settled in to pushing myself, and I just focused on my breath and the movements. Every so often I’d pause so I could drink water, not destroy my joints, and keep pace, but I wasn’t yelling at myself the whole time wondering why I wasn’t able to do these basic movements.

Today I repeated it with the X Stretch. While it’s the simplest of the exercises, I not only kept up, I saw visible improvements over last week.

Not only that, today I held to the diet without feeling hungry or running out of energy.

Last night I was out till 1 and tonight I didn’t back from work until 8:30. Despite that, I went straight to exercising and if I had wanted, I still had time to go out for the night.

I’ve reached a sustainable state where I have more energy, I can keep up with the exercises, and I’m less worried about injuring myself.

There’s not much of a seeable difference yet, but this is a leap forward.

I’m at a place where I look forward to destroying myself with each new exercise. I make no promises how I’ll feel tomorrow.

 

Day 21. There’s no good excuse for missing a day

I’ve got it pretty good. I don’t need to get into work until 10AM, and I can leave as early as I want as long as the job gets done. That means I have the flexibility to work out in the morning or at night depending on how my  mood strikes. Even when I go out at night, there’s almost always a two hour window.

This last weekend, I realized it won’t always be that way, and I’ll have to figure out ways around it.

I worked as a camp counselor for all of Shabbat (see video above) and while I worked out on Friday before leaving, and Sunday after coming back, Saturday I couldn’t. It was the first day I missed since starting. I was with campers the entire day, electricity wasn’t allowed, and there wasn’t a place of privacy to do it even if it was. When I’m traveling I could face a similar situation.

There was a two hour block of free time on Shabbat, and while it wouldn’t have been simple I could have used that time. That’s how it’s going to be when I get into teaching next week. On the days where I don’t get to the next city until 11PM, just skipping like I did this weekend isn’t an option. There’s a one and a half hour break for lunch every day. I have no plans of slipping.

 

Day 20. Recovery Drink

I drank a recovery drink for the first time today. It was incredible. I’m sure eventually I’ll discover that my recipe is twice as fattening and half as beneficial as other methods, but for now let me live in my fantasy world. As Tony would say, “It’s a beautiful thing.”

Here’s the recipe, which I found at P90X Nutrition Plan…actually on double checking that doesn’t have it. Here’s the recipe with a comment thread attached on health benefits.

• 1 frozen banana (notably, peel before freezing. Yes, I did make that mistake first.)
• 1 cup of soy or almond milk (unflavored/nonfat of course.)
• 1 tbsp of peanut butter (low fat/organic/natural of course).

Blend.

That’s the whole recipe, and it was perfect.

In the future I’ll experiment with adding/replacing Whey protein powder, cocoa powder, other fruits, unfrozen bananas, only half a banana, and possibly other items from the Nutrition Plan website.

Total Cost:

• Banana: $.15
• Milk: $.40
• Peanut Butter: $.20
• Total : 85 cents FTW

 

Day 19. Trading Time

Every so often I take on a freelance assignment for a friend, and because they’re my friend I have a hard time charging them. I’d cost far too much if I charged them my full rate and any other price cheapens me.

Because of all of the lost time from exercising (up to 2 hours a day if cooking is included) I started thinking of ways to save time and realized these two problems share the same solution.

A sane person would say that mutual solution is to stop taking on work that pays nothing. I am not that person.

When helping a friend who can’t pay full price I’ll charge them in time. If I’m going to spend 20 hours working on a freebie project for them, I’ll charge them 20 hours of their life. No money needs to change hands, only the equivalent amount of man hours.

My current time distribution is unsustainable, but one change at a time I will pull through.

 

Day 18. Travel

Anyone can exercise when nothing’s going on in their life, or at the very least they have a consistent schedule. I don’t have that luxury. These next two days I’m gone, and know I’ll fall behind by one day. There will literally be no alone time or place to exercise. I’ll make it up on Sunday by pushing myself more than normal, and not fall behind a day.

With that said, this month has been hard without any travel, and next month it’s nonstop trip after trip. I’m excited to see how these posts, and more importantly the exercise itself is affected.

 

Day 17. Quality. Quantity. Crap.

I told myself I’d write every day on the subject of exercising. It’s a bit confining. I have 15 minutes to scratch off some pithy comment on how I felt about watching a man encourage me to lift horrible weight things for an hour straight, just as he did yesterday and the day before. I’ve switched it up to a bit of dieting and the ability to wake up, but that’s not the scope I had originally intended when I set out with this.

I’m going to keep to this daily journal format, but what these come down to isn’t the diet, the ability to wake up or even the exercise. They come down to the little tests that make up the day. Do I eat that snack or do I resist? Do I waste time watching TV or do I write? Do I lay around in bed or do I jump up and start the day? Exercise is just the main lens those tests are coming in right now. There’s very little difference between something that’s easy and laziness. The moment it gets hard is the moment things get interesting and any growth can happen.

The difficulty of painting, or writing, of starting a business, polishing a website, or putting out a show all crystalize in their purest form with exercise. The difficulty is in growth, and pushing it further each time. Exercise asks nothing more than can you weigh less and grow more muscles? It’s a single factor. It’s a place to start.

 

Day 16. Zombie Jeremy, RIP

I’ve been getting up in the mornings, putting me in a zombie state for the rest of the day, casting me into a sorry state of needing-to-go-to-bed-before-midnight. It’s completely throws off my desire to go out as often as possible.

This morning I couldn’t do it, so instead the moment I got home I worked out. It’s 1:18 right now, and I’m not yet tired. It let me have a second day. It switched exercise from a horrible task that sucks away my mornings and drains my energy at night into something that allows me to go out as late as I want at night without getting tired.

With this, I’ve pushed past the initial struggle. This is where worthwhile discoveries really start to happen. I’m excited.