Seems pretty chilly everywhere in the northern hemisphere these days, and no different here. We dipped to around minus 20 on a couple of days this week [snap from lunchtime walk attached], but I've managed to maintain reasonable activity levels. Most days I do my round-the-block walk, sometimes early in the morning, pre-work, pre-sunrise; or late at night, when the streets are dark and empty. Last night it was 1:30 a.m. when I finally got out.
The walk is only 1.2 to 2 miles, depending on time and appetite and temperature, but it always includes the steep plunge through the town, and the (naturlich) equally steep return. The full upward pull is 800 metres in length, but if I'm pushed for time, as I usually am, I turn off into my road on about 650-700 metres. Still testing enough to create a sweat-glazed forehead, and so it gets a cell on my spreadsheet, albeit in apologetic italics.
The heavier duty is the gym. I get there every second day, for an hour or so of pretty furious trundling. I can now declare that cardio sessions in the gym need not be boring as long as they're treated as interval workouts. Even 20 minutes on the elliptical or bike or treadmill can offer quite an intense workout if you're steadily pushing yourself up the gears. I look forward to going.
I'm happy with my progress. The opportunity of plodding by the light of the silvery Garmin has been withdrawn, so I look elsewhere for metrics. Weight is an obvious one. Exactly 20 pounds of ballast has been jettisoned in the current campaign, which 'officially' began at (April 22 minus 18 weeks). The Zurich Marathon 2012 may no longer be a live possibility, but its ghost remains. As always, I am in a state of happy denial. This dates the start of the current campaign to the week before Christmas -- the traditionally ideal point to begin a marathon campaign, real or imagined. So that's... 8 weeks, or a loss of about 1.1 kg a week. This is a healthy rate. Without alcohol, everything is easier.
Another measure of progress is the increasing fitness being revealed by the gym machines. The levels I was struggling to reach when I started are now close to my starting points.
Less demonstrable is an increasing mental clarity about the task ahead. Here, you will just have to take my word for it. I have a target but am still deep in negotiation with my instincts about how to reach it. What we agree on is that weight and general fitness are obvious places to start, and these sub-campaigns are going to plan. Getting rid of alcohol has been a major step forward. One of the few good things about Almeria this year was the chance to conduct a final experiment - just to be sure. And now I'm sure. What a shit drug that is - for me.
Talking of drugs, I've taken another break from Twitter. And from the main RC website. We all know the Interweb thingie is wonderful, but it encourages vicarious living. It makes me feel as if I'm watching my life on television, rather than living it. Spectator rather than participant. Living on my own at the moment hasn't helped. It might have increased my dependency on it. Not good, and so for a while at least, I'm reducing the time I spend online.
Maybe it's an age thing, but I'm also becoming strangely sickened by the amount of sniping and resentment and abuse I see and hear everywhere. I've donated a fair few buckets of bile myself in the past, so I'm trying not to be sanctimonious. But I've reached my limit. Recent events in English football have pushed me past the point of bemused tolerance. Or rather, not the events themselves but the raging tempests of bickering that inevitably follow on the radio and on the web, and which eventually start to create and shape the next installments. It won't stop if I complain, so best to shrug and silently join the majority of the world's population who see the bunfight for what it is -- or who don't see it at all. I've reached opinion saturation. Everywhere I look, everywhere I listen, someone is trying to give me their version of truth. Nine times out of ten, opinions are so tainted by deeper prejudices that the opinions are useless and unconsciously dishonest. That's my view, and don't bother to think something else because you are wrong and I am right.
Right. Action. Gym and German vocabulary podcast await.
