Making a Healthy Turn Perhaps

There's no way that I can lie about the fact that I'm not in the best of shape. Since my unemployment I've probably put on some weight and taken on an increasingly unhealthy sedentary lifestyle. I've decided to get this under control and take back my life in an attempt to use this 'free' time to turn my habits into healthy living. In the last couple of weeks Ashes and I have made a solemn decision to actively change the way we're living.

I can't even remember how it happened. A month or two ago I grabbed my bike from my parents house and started going biking every few days. It felt really good and I kept doing it on occasion. Then Ashes and I started walking. It just happened, and then we decided that we really liked the walks as both leisure and fitness. We started going on walks every day. If we weren't in the mood for walks we'd still go for at least 2 miles. They started out leisurely but gradually we picked up the pace. The great thing about our apartment is that it's situated less than a mile from the Orono Bike Trails. A quick walk down the road and we have a 2 1/2 mile path through the woods for us to use. It's brilliant for use because we can go out and back for a total of 5 miles which makes charting how far we're going no problem.

Earlier this week (or last weekend?) we went down to Portland for the day. Towards the end of our trip we made our way over to the Back Cove Trail and briskly walked around the whole thing once. You can check out our vlogs at my Youtube page which were shot while we were doing that walk. The great thing about walking is we can tack it on to any trip we take. There's always someplace to walk anywhere we go and usually it will lead us to someplace we wouldn't normally have seen if we were just going to shop or drive around hitting the sights. We're determined to walk along the coast in Acadia this summer and do a hell of a lot more hiking. Once we're in shape it won't be half as hard as it is now. Sure Ashes has asthma and back/spine problems, but she's clearly willing to work through them.

At the moment we're not quite in shape enough to do full jogging spurts. Working ourselves into a fit state that will allow us to jog for more than a quarter of a mile is a big goal. More calories are burned if we're doing a job instead of just a walk. Our goal is really to get a good schedule by mid-to-late summer. Something like walk two days, jog one, day off, walk one, jog one, day off, cycle here and there. Similar to that y'know, something that will keep us healthy. It really will take us a while to get to that point, me in particular. I haven't jogged at all since high school, probably second year. So that means it's been ten years since I've pushed myself at a fast pace. It feels good, let me tell you, it feels really good. We did about a quarter of a mile jog at the end of a 6 mile walk the other day and it hurt me, but it was a good pain. The pain of accomplishment and adrenaline. I expect a lot more of that by the end of the summer, wherever we are (which probably won't be South Korea or Japan or anything cool).

The main contributing factor that is making this change so easy, especially for Ashes, is the availability of apps and widgets that make tracking our progress very simple and fun. In particular there is the website The Daily Mile. This website is very handy. Posting every bit of exercise is a simple matter of finding the route you took and mapping it in their system. This will calculate the mileage that was covered, and after inputting the amount of time it took the program will be able to calculate the pace and the amount of calories burned. Each user has a profile page that also functions as a journal of sorts in that it keeps a record of all previous exercise and will provide weekly updates that make charting progress simple. Separate entries for walking, running, or biking will calculate the burned calories for that activity. It's a valuable resource for anyone that needs extra motivation or visualization in order to stick with something, which is definitely us.

The other app that we (well she) use is similar but instead of charting exercise it monitors food intake. It's on the Livestrong website, but since I don't use it I'm not sure what it's called. At signup you make a decision on the amount of weight you want to lose from 1-2 lbs. a week. It then gives you a daily calorie limit and allows you to input each thing you eat in a given day, calculating the calorie count and showing how many are left in a given day. Obviously exercise will help keep the count under the daily allowable limit. Consistently going under the daily limit will lead to faster weight loss and better health. Like I said this isn't a program that I use, but I don't eat any more than Ashes eats on a given day. So if she is coming in under the limit than I am too.

All of this is working in my favor. I'm not being pretentious about this, buying expensive gym memberships and douchey training clothes. It's a slow process that we're going to keep plugging away at and slowly increasing the amount of effort we put into our program. Like I've said we will start out walking, integrate jogging and cycling, and eventually we'll be in great shape ready to take on the world!

Don't sit around and expect change to happen! Take control of your life and force change into your life. I've been a lazy gamer for my whole teen-to-adult life and I've had enough of it. All this time is mine and I refuse to spend it sitting on my ass when I could be making progress on any number of things, and I AM.

Enough about all this for now. I have more writing I need to do. I've got some great ideas and I can't let them slip away.

Well root for me my loyal brigands. Root for me because I need it. I need to become not-a-fatass and healthy. Cheers.

The Way I Am

I've made a couple of decisions lately. Time has been something that I have an abundance of lately. For a little while it was okay. Catch up on some games and browse a little internet. That sort of schedule just doesn't keep a person going, physically or mentally. So for that reason I've decided to try and spruce up my life and make good use of the time I have.

Firstly I'm going to start biking every (or as close to every) morning. University of Maine's bike path is just down the street. Less than a mile away from where I live is an access point to the path and I've never really made use of it for any extended period. Well I'm changing that starting immediately. A lack of recent activity has really left me a bit out of shape. I'm hoping that this little activity will help me get back into proper working order.

Since spring has started so damn early in the year this is actually something I was able to start immediately. Had this been last year I wouldn't be able to start until maybe a month and a half from this date. I actually started doing this earlier in the morning of the day I'm writing this post. I woke up at 7:55, which is somewhat early. Between getting prepared and bidding Ashes adieu I didn't manage to get out the door until 8:10. Sadly today proved to be a bit chillier than recent weather. In fact, it was straight up cold. I was freezing half way into the ride. That was my only real complaint. Well that and my own heavy breathing/wheezing by the time I got home. It was about 3 miles from the apartment to the entrance by the campus, round trip of course. I'm going to keep doing that little bit each morning until I work out my ring-rust. Then I'll start incorporating the part of the path that goes past the farm, and even further out all the way down past the school.

The other decision I've made is to start following a little bit more strict format here at the blog. I'll still have the same BS blogs that I'm always doing, but I want to throw in weekly articles to make myself work within a deadline. So far I've come up with ideas for a couple ideas. The first is a weekly post about trying new stuff (food, drink, whatever I find at a convenience store) and what I think these products. Glorified product reviews really. I like some of the 'conbini' posts I see on J-Blogs and want to follow that sort of theme on my own blog. The second idea I have is a weekly post about video games. Sort of do this anyway, but I want to formalize it. Y'know, pick a theme or something and write posts weekly. Lastly I want to try and work in a hard news article with the aim of getting it published somewhere. I had another idea, but son of a vaudruke if I can remember it at all. Weekly short stories? Would y'all like to see that? Anyway I'm outlining a new format/schedule for my blog. Look to see some changes around here in the future.

There are other changes I want to implement, like working on some manner of group project or networking my blog. But I don't know how to network and I can't motivate myself to getting into that side of blogging. And group projects, I don't have a group! I'm barely making progress on my own projects.

We'll see how this all goes. I'm going to try and make myself follow through on this. Gotta keep the faith and make it happen! Next post will be more interesting, I promise.