crnahg_yhor | Entries tagged with exercise

( exercise log )

( negative body image, strength )

it'd benefit me to have a place to record this that might not be here, but eh.

i'd also benefit from figuring out what's going on with markdown on dreamwidth, i think.

rowing machine 3/week for half an hour wasn't really working and i kept putting it off, because "that's so long" and "i'll be so tired afterwards and i have to function later".

on tuesday it occurred to me that i might benefit from doing just a bit every weekday, instead.

( Read more... )

going shorter means i don't completely spend myself, so i have any energy afterwards for other things.

for now, have given up on trying to watch anything while i do it, and instead have just been listening to music. i'd like to double up on what i'm doing, but it was too many things to juggle for not a lot of benefit. music is a little bit faster paced and easier to zone out to, so that's good.

i cleaned out the garage for the purpose of moving this out there, but ... it's pretty bleak in there even after all that work.

it's only been four days, so let's see how it goes next week.

the exercise equipment from previously

( times/distances )

( bodies )

for lack of a better goal at the moment, trying to do longer and farther each time; i'll deal with intensity later. i guess i should pick a goal time/distance? starting with 3 days a week, but i think it might be best to work up to doing it every weekday.

( but why can't i do everything )

the one problem is that the damn thing takes up SO MUCH SPACE in the dining room. eventually, going to make the garage pleasant enough to be in that we can work out from there.

... but that's a lot of work, i think. off the top of my head: all the weird shelving it came with needs to get removed; it'd be nice to put up something over the walls so they aren't icky grody wood; if we're going to cover up the walls maybe we should insulate them?; lighting; gotta fix the messed up power supply...

i guess i could get started by going out there and taking a look at how the shelving is attached.

it's ENORMOUS & needs as much room as our dining table

planning to have it in the house for now, but i guess i'd better start thinking about how to make the garage not a scary bad place, so that I can use it out there.

i went for not even 20 minutes and my arms are going to fall off, a+

after yesterday, i did a bunch of pushups (getting stronger is good, and i managed to do ... 60? 75? knee-pushups? progress), cleaned up the kitchen, drank a bunch of tea, watched half of 宝石の国/land of the lustrous again, and impulsively made an apple galette. improvement!

the last one: i was scrolling through pictures of food, faux-yelling "acculturate me, damnit! teach me what to aspire to!" while the cohuman was debugging our heater. i saw a picture of an apple galette. i made apple galette. it came out pretty decently; i erred on the side of underworking the crust, so a lot of the butter melted out and fried it, but it was incredibly flakey anyway.

last year i had an overpriced gym membership, and i'd go twice a week and have a person tell me what to do. it was okay. i tried not having a person tell me what to do, but i was too shy to actually work out in the gym ... what if i was in someone's way? what if i was doing it wrong?

shelter in place, and i was too embarrassed to work out at home: i didn't have any equipment, or space, and there were people around who could see me, and i hated it. we didn't even go out hiking or biking because there were too many people in too many crowds. (i'm baffled when i hear people say SF has one of the highest mask-wearing-rates, because it didn't feel like that around my neighborhood!)

since we have moved, i have done a half-assed not-even-a-routine: a shitton of (modified) pushups. counter-pushups move about 1/3 of bodyweight; knees 1/2; normal 2/3. i started at 3*10 counter, upped it over a week or three to 5*20 counter, and now I'm replacing as many as I can with knee-pushups (currently at 1/2 knees, yay). i figured it was probably better to do a shitton of lower-weight with good form than a few at high weight with bad form.

cohuman and i agreed that we'd get equipment for cardio stuff, because we both have previously enjoyed doing it; they got an exercise bike, and i'm on the waitlist for a rowing machine. looking forward to that; i liked using it at the gym, and i bet i'll like it even more when i have something to zone out to while doing it.

we have a garage now (!!!) and i am excited to eventually set it up for working out, though i guess we'll be going slow but steady on that front.

( body image )

I moved to SF 3ish 4ish years ago, and brought three of my four bikes with me: folding bike, touring bike, ~cyclocross bike. (I've never done and probably never will do cyclocross, but the low-middle end ones are great.) For reasons ranging from 'bad' to 'yeah, no, that's fair', I didn't get the touring and cx bikes fully reassembled until last summer. I didn't do very any long rides after that (long being > 40mi for me), but we did manage to go camping 4 times... which I guessed worked out to around 40 miles each trip.

We signed up to do STP this year. We've done it before; 124 miles the first day and 80 the second. I wasn't wrecked at the end, and I did it on very little training: I think in the 3 months leading up to it, I only rode like .... 300 miles, and my longest was a flat 50, and I was trashed at the end of that. I'd gone touring and stuff a few months before, also pretty flat, where my longest day was 80, so I wasn't in garbage shape overall.

In any case, because I'm older and less tolerant of doing painful miserable shit, I want to train for it this time. And part of the reason I moved to SF (a small part, but a part) is that there's great biking nearby (...if you can get to it). I spent a bunch of time last week looking for rides we could do straight from our doorstep. We've ridden all the way up Twin Peaks 3 times in the last 5 days.

I want to bike and climb and run and and and a billion other sports, but I'm okay to focus on just the one for now. I'm going to keep going to the climbing gym about once a week, to keep the habit at all; I won't run (even though I want to) until after STP because it's too easy for me to fuck up my ankles.

Feelings I don't like: Yesterday my housemate biked up hawk hill on their (heavy, poorly-fitting, 3-speed) folding bike, and I'm pissed off. I have to go bike it too. I need to demonstrate that I'm more bikes, damnit. I need to do it, and more, and faster. They averaged 2.5mph going uphill, so it's not like it's going to be hard for me to do it, but I'm mad anyway.

My psychiatrist, a while ago, suggested that I try taking creatine, because I'm vegan and therefore (while probably not deficient unless something was really wrong) had lower levels than most people which at least doesn't help with the whole cluster of anxiety and depression thing.

I didn't bother actually thinking about trying this until recently, so I looked at creatine powders... and they're all, y'know, muscle-gender-branded, all "increase your muscle gains!" and "max power!" to the point where I didn't want to buy them, mostly out of inchoate fears about the contents, but also ... because I have to put that on a shelf, in the kitchen, and what if my friends and/or housemates judge me for having weird stuff like that?

So instead I bought some nerd-gender-branded. The packaging is understated (at least in comparison) and there aren't any promises of strength gain or anything; it has an abstracted line drawing of a brain on it.

I told my friends about it when it arrived, because it's still a big vat of powder that says creatine! on it, and I lampshade things I feel weird about, and they immediately agreed & understood about nerd- and muscle-genders as a thing more-or-less orthogonal to male- and female-genders.

... I wondered after if I accidentally ripped myself off, paying a lot more per unit than I needed to because I was avoiding some based off packaging alone, but on casual inspection, the price I paid was on the cheap-per-unit side.

It's also interesting how so many of the ones I'm saying aren't "nerd-gender" have appeals to science on them: studies, images of things like DNA and electron orbits, etc. I think I can still argue of a division into two groups, based on whether the packaging/materials with it talk about strength gains or nootropics.

I haven't gone bouldering in months. I've never been very good (At my best, I've barely been able to do v3 routes), and I think most people improve faster than me, but I've always liked being there.

In Pittsburgh it was easy to go regularly, because my friends would drag me along whenever they went. But here... the only other person I know who climbs is way better than me¹. I get the impression that many people treat climbing and ?especially? bouldering as a sorta social activity, and like meeting other people doing it... and lots of people have talked to me while I'm at the gym, and nearly all of them are from out of town.

I think I said on Monday that I would go today, but I don't want to! I'm cold! It's far away! I hate it!

Real reasons to not go: It would suck to wreck my tendons again. My knees were angry the other day for mystery reasons.

Reasons to go / reasons to not not go: My shoulders/elbow/hands hurt in the way that climbing seems to help with. I have plenty of time. I can bike there now. It's cold, so I can wear clothes I don't feel weird about.

I'm going, I'm going.

[1]: at climbing, at working, at being a good person², etc. what a good person! it drives me up the wall. alas, only metaphorically. I do like them, as a person and as a friend, but I think climbing with them would lead only to me comparing myself to them and falling short every time.

[2]: they couldn't come to wafflesgiving because they were doing rescue in the wildfires.