#oneaday Day 108: Punch punch punch

Because I’m sick of feeling like a decrepit old man and I can’t quite muster up the mental wellbeing to head to the gym right now, I dusted off my copy of Fitness Boxing 2 for Nintendo Switch and have been giving it a go for the last couple of days. I considered grabbing the new Hatsune Miku version of the game, but it’s £50 and I haven’t yet established a good routine with the two previous entries in the series I have on my shelf. So I thought I’d do something about it.

The trouble with exercise is that it always feels like it’s going to be a bloody nightmare to get started, particularly after a long period of inactivity, but then once you actually do it it’s rather satisfying. My two sessions of Fitness Boxing 2 over the past couple of days have been hard work for someone as out of shape as I am — though my rhythm game skills have netted me a “Fitness Age” of 24 on both occasions, thereby proving once and for all that such a metric is, as everyone suspected, complete bollocks — but I’ve come out of both of them feeling like I’ve done something worthwhile, and something that, in the long run, will be good for me.

For those unfamiliar with Fitness Boxing, it’s a game that somewhat follows the mould of Nintendo’s classic Wii-era fitness games, only with a bit more of a specific focus rather than providing lots of minigames. At its core, it’s a rhythm game, tasking you with using the Joy-Cons to punch in various ways and, in the more advanced workouts, ducking, weaving and suchlike, too — though pleasingly, given how dodgy the motion detection can be on movements other than punching, you can turn any troublesome exercises off, or set the game to automatically score you “Perfect” on them, regardless of what the Joy-Cons tell the Switch you were doing.

A full daily workout consists of several stages, beginning and ending with some simple stretches. In between, you’ll have a series of specific workouts of varying degrees of intensity and difficulty, typically following your opening stretches and preceding your closing stretches with something relatively gentle and putting one or more fairly high-intensity (and longer) ones in the middle.

Each individual stage tends to unfold in the same way. You’ll start in “orthodox” stance (left foot forward, right foot back) and gradually be introduced to a complete combo, usually one move at a time but sometimes a bit quicker in the shorter, lower-intensity stages. You’ll gradually build up to performing the full combo, and in a special “Zone” sequence where you get more points, you perform the full combo multiple times in rapid succession — typically four, six or eight times in a row without a gap in between, depending on the length of the combo.

After that, you switch to “southpaw” stance (right foot forward, left foot back) and then do the exact same thing, but the other way around. In the higher intensity, longer workouts, you’ll then do another combo, again both in orthodox and southpaw stances, and then you’re done.

Typically a short stage lasts about 5-6 minutes, and longer stages are about 11-12 minutes apiece. The “Normal” intensity workout for a day consists of stretches, two short stages and two long stages, totalling about 35-40 minutes of activity altogether; you also have the choice of doing a slightly shorter or longer workout, which equates to about 25-30 or 45-50 minutes of activity respectively by varying the number of stages in the complete workout.

As someone who is desperately unfit, the pacing of the exercises seem OK to me at the moment. The longer stages definitely feel like an effort to endure, but that’s good — they’re not so difficult that I can’t make it through them, but I do feel like I’m doing some actual work that will be beneficial.

I could be doing them better, of course; the game suggests that when you’re not punching, you bob back and forth in time with the music and I can’t quite manage to keep that up constantly along with all the other stuff, but I’m sure I can get there over the long term. The important thing is, after all, getting started.

The trainer voices throughout are rather repetitive, but helpful in giving you cues and encouragement, and the visual demonstration of what you’re supposed to be doing (“mirrored” so you can follow along more easily) is very helpful. The game-like feel to the whole thing makes it feel more “fun” than some other forms of exercise, and there’s a wide range of musical accompaniments to go along with your workouts — including both instrumental versions of “real” songs and some original stuff composed specifically for the game. The original stuff is actually quite a bit better than some of the Kidz Bop-tier arrangements, but honestly part of the fun of the game is the absurdity inherent in aggressively throwing punches to something like Hot and Cold by Katy Perry or the frigging YMCA.

I have a long drive tomorrow afternoon after work, and then a long drive back home after work the day after, so I’ll likely take a rest for at least tomorrow and possibly the day after also, depending on how I feel when I get back, but I intend to get back to this as soon as I can. It feels pitched at about the level I can deal with right now, and I think it’ll just be helpful to get moving a bit in any way. Because I’m sick of waking up aching all over like someone twice my age, and I suspect a significant part of the reason that is happening is because I haven’t been exercising.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

#oneaday Day 14: Sleep, Needed

In stark contrast to yesterday’s very good sleep (albeit with interruption by noisily vomiting cat), last night I slept terribly. I went to bed with a pain in my back and took some painkillers, which helped a bit, but it took me ages to get to sleep and I woke up multiple times throughout the night. There wasn’t even a good reason for it this time; Patti was, as usual, in her spot at the foot of our bed, but she wasn’t in the way or being sick. I was just waking up and then taking a long time to actually get back to sleep again.

Still, it’s the weekend now, so if I want to (I probably want to) I can have a nice lie-in tomorrow. I don’t think we have anything vastly important planned for the weekend, so we can just have a bit of nice relaxing time, I can make some videos and we can generally recharge and recuperate ahead of it all starting again on Monday.

I’m not going to the gym or swimming today as I still feel extremely stiff and achey, not helped by the poor night’s sleep. I have succeeded in my original goal, though, which was to get out of the house in the morning and do something active at least twice, and I think I will make some time over the weekend to go either swimming or to the gym, depending on their respective availability.

I’m feeling motivated to try and get things going back in the right direction, so it’s a bit frustrating that it feels like my body is just going “eh, no” right this second, but I’m sure that’s 1) a temporary thing and 2) something that I’ll have to power through in the long term. I’m willing to put in that work, but there’s also no rush to get it done. Past experience tells me that working up to things gradually is the way to go; try and do too much too soon and it’s easy to completely lose all that motivation you’d built up. And I don’t want that to happen.

Apropos of nothing, I thought I’d look back at what I was up to ten years ago today, since the long life of this blog means I can actually check such things. It appears that I was 1,615 posts deep into my original #oneaday effort, and I’d just watched a then-new show on the TV channel Dave known as Alan Davies: As Yet Untitled. I have no idea if this show is still running, but reading back over the post, I remember it being enjoyable, lightweight television that didn’t demand too much of the viewer.

Reading that makes me think how much our relationship with media has changed in just ten years. Today, I’m very unlikely to watch anything “on television” (i.e. live broadcasts), and a lot of the stuff I do watch on a day-to-day basis is via YouTube. Right now, I am watching through all of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine on DVD as a bedtime activity, though, and that’s a nice reminder of how enjoyable classic TV could be… hell, how enjoyable a show of that format still is.

In fact, I’m probably due some sort of retrospective post on Deep Space Nine and my relationship with Star Trek in general. Well, I guess that’s a topic for tomorrow sorted! For now, though, my dinner is ready so I’m off to eat and then quite possibly to just collapse into bed aftwards.

#oneaday Day 8: Escaping a Rut

Hello. As has probably been quite apparent from my last few posts, I’ve been in something of a rut mental health-wise for a little while now, and I’ve reached a point where I actively want to do something about it. Starting up the whole #oneaday thing again is part of that, but I also need to make some more active changes to my lifestyle in order to make progress.

Specifically, I need to get properly back into the swing of following Slimming World, as I’ve been a tad lax on that for the past few weeks, and I also want to try and get a bit more exercise. Along with that, I want to try and start my day a bit earlier rather than rolling out of bed and immediately into work.

Thus, what I would like to start achieving from the beginning of next week is getting up a couple of hours earlier, going to our local pool and having a swim before work. One of my big mental blocks with exercise is when I feel like it’s encroaching on “my” time after work, and so going first thing in the morning is a good way of getting around that, since I don’t count the period before work starts as really “my” time as such. This may sound daft to you, but it’s the way my brain has always thought of things.

The difficulty is going to be actually getting up a couple of hours earlier. The reason I’ve fallen into the habit of getting up pretty much immediately before work starts is because I haven’t felt like I’ve had anything to get up “for”, but conversely this means that I don’t want to get up any earlier than I do because my brain has come to think of those last few moments of sleep as somehow more precious than the rest of the night.

Part of this is to do with the “trapped inside your own head” phenomenon that I talked about the other day. I’m most likely to feel like I “can’t” get up because I “need to finish” the dream I was having first thing in the morning, and that, for quite some time now, has prevented me from getting up at a sensible time. That, I feel, is going to be the most significant battle I face on the road to making a bit of morning exercise a regular routine.

Thing is, swimming is an activity I actually like doing, in contrast to a lot of other forms of exercise that I tend to feel negatively about. I find swimming both relaxing and invigorating; I know I’m not very good at it, but it’s something that I simply like. And since it’s something that, done enough, can actually be good for me, I feel like I should take advantage of that fact.

So, then, the challenge is going to be ensuring that I actually haul myself out of bed in time to go for a swim of a morning. My local pool does morning sessions every weekday morning between 7 and 9, and ideally speaking, I’d like to try and go every day. I feel like that might be an unrealistic target to begin with, though, so for the upcoming week I’m setting myself the goal of getting up and going swimming before work at least twice during the week.

I guess we’ll have to wait and see how that goes. I’m trying not to contemplate “likely failure” before it happens, and go into this with a positive mindset. But we’ll see, I guess!

A little positivity: gradual improvements.

As I’ve alluded to a number of times recently, the COVID years have really done a number on my body and mind. The enforced isolation from the initial lockdowns caused me to be even more inactive than I had previously been, and my weight and general wellbeing declined considerably as a result. (Well, my weight inclined. My general bodily wellbeing declined. You know what I mean.)

Given that decline, it’s been very hard to 1) motivate myself to try and improve the situation and 2) actually improve the situation.

Andie and I have joined the local gym a couple of times in recent months/years, but we always ended up making excuses to not go, so I feel like that wasn’t right for me — not in my present state, anyway. I needed something that was just plain relaxing and enjoyable, but which would do me some degree of “good”, so I decided to start going for a walk a few evenings a week.

I’ve done this before and I’ve always found it quite pleasant; my hesitance to do it more often largely stems from the fact that we live on the top of a big hill and, as such, whichever direction you set off from, you always finish a walk having to climb quite a steep incline. Which, again, in my current state, is not particularly desirable. I know pushing yourself is good, but I don’t think you appreciate what a terrible state my muscles are in.

With this in mind, I looked around the local parks for some suitable walking routes. I’ve been for walks on the big Common here in Southampton a number of times previously, and that’s always very pleasant, but I fancied a bit of a change. So I decided to check out Riverside Park (not pictured in the header — that’s a stock image!), an area that seems to be quite fondly regarded by local residents (those who are inclined to leave Google reviews on patches of grass, anyway) and have found it to be a nice place to try and build myself up a bit again.

I’ve been kicking off with a basic “circuit” of part of the park that comes out to a little over a mile in length. Not much, I know, but again, I’m not in a great state, so I wanted and needed to start relatively gently. Already, after just three trips doing along this route, I’ve felt an improvement. Not a huge one — it’s very early days, of course — but an improvement nonetheless.

One thing I will note is that I’m very deliberately not quantifying or “gamifying” my walks. In fact, I’m making a specific effort to completely disconnect when I go for them. I leave my phone behind and carry nothing but my car key so it really is just me. No music, no podcasts, no distractions, no GPS tracking, no step counting — just me.

The reason for this is that I feel you can over-quantify the things you do. Yes, it can be motivational to have hard data and see how much you’re improving — but equally, it can be demoralising to learn what you thought was an impressive achievement actually wasn’t all that great. So I’ve ditched all that in favour of good old fashioned feelings. And, halfway through my walk this evening, I felt surprisingly good.

The reason for this was that I reached the “halfway point” (I say this in inverted commas because it’s not really halfway, it just feels like it) a lot more quickly and easily than I have done on my previous couple of trips around this route. In fact, it almost felt like the initial part of the route flashed by almost inconsequentially, whereas on the first day I tried, it was a struggle to get moving at all.

I still felt like I’d had a reasonably decent workout (by my standards; please remember I am very unfit and very heavy) by the end of my walk. Things started to get noticeably more difficult on the “return journey”, which I take on dirt paths rather than the paved outward bound route, but I made it back to my car without wanting to die, and with a sense of some satisfaction that I’d made some progress. A miniscule amount by the standards of someone who has a basic level of human fitness, sure, but a significant victory by my own standards.

I’m going to continue with this for a while and see how things go. Perhaps at some point I’ll feel up to adding an additional “lap” to the circuit for an easy means of going a little further and pushing myself a little harder. For now, I think I’ve found my pace — and while it might not look like much to a bystander, it’s definitely something to me.

1697: Adjustments

I am very tired. This is a side-effect of my new routine, which necessitates getting up at some point before (or, more commonly just before) 7am, going out, doing some work for a normal working day, then coming home in time for about 6pm, eating dinner, then doing something relaxing and pleasant in the evening.

This may not sound all that tiring to those of you who have happily been holding down nine-to-fives for the last umpteen years, but it’s been something of a culture shock to me.

Actually, that might be a slight exaggeration. But after four years of working from home, often in my pants, there have been a number of adjustments I’ve had to make. And, you know, aside from the whole “getting up early” thing (which I still loathe thanks to my body’s uncanny ability to be extremely tired in the morning regardless of whether I go to bed early, timely…ly or ridiculously late) these adjustment haven’t been all that bad — and I think they’ll have a positive effect overall.

The biggest change is, of course, the fact that I am no longer working from home and consequently have to 1) put clothes on and 2) travel to work. The former’s not really an issue — I joke about working in my pants, but in reality more often than not I did get dressed to do work, because it put me in the right mindset to do useful things.

The latter, however, is a noteworthy change. I have a drive of about 45 minutes or so to my place of work, followed by a 10-15 minute walk from where I park my car to the actual office. This means that I’m getting a bit of very light exercise every day, which is probably a good thing. I can’t say it’s particularly strenuous exercise, given that I tend to walk quite slowly — a trait I have apparently inherited from my mother without noticing at some point — but it is exercise of sorts, and it’s every day.

There’s also actually a gym on site at my new workplace, which I will probably join at some point soon, since it’s a lot cheaper than the one I’m currently a member of. (Plus I walk past it on the way out of work every day, so that makes it a lot more difficult to ignore… and it has the advantage of meaning that if I stay late to do even a short workout, I’m less likely to run into rush-hour traffic on the way home, which will be very nice indeed.)

The fact I’m working in an office rather than in my own house, which, to put the following in context, is approximately 5 minutes’ walk from a Tesco Express, means that I’m less inclined to wander out and purchase various snacks and sugary drinks when I’m feeling hungry, too. Instead, I’m drinking a lot more water, I’ve cut down a fair bit on the lattes — no more than one or two a day, usually just the one to pep me up a bit in the morning — and I’ve almost entirely eliminated fizzy pop from consideration when I think about what I’d like to drink. I take my own lunch when either Andie or I remember to prepare it the night before (because let’s face it, neither of us feel inclined to do so at that ungodly hour in the morning) but even when I don’t, the work canteen is pretty good, with a selection of decent food rather than the usual “chips with everything” situation I typically associate with the word “canteen”.

So on the whole, then, things are going well and I hope they will have a positive impact on both my physical and mental wellbeing. It’s too early to say right now, but I’ll certainly be keeping an eye on things as I continue to settle in.

1512: Fatigue

I joined the gym again yesterday, and got up early to go this morning. Now I feel like shit. I feel the two things are not coincidental, though the “feeling like shit” part, to be fair, was lingering in the background before the “going to the gym” part, so going to the gym probably did not help matters.

I am in a frustrating situation in that I clearly need to do some exercise — I’ve been feeling super-crappy recently, getting out of breath far too easily, and something I’ve done somewhere along the line feels like it’s knackered my left knee — but actually getting back into a good routine looks like it is going to be difficult. It will, of course, get easier over time assuming I keep it up, but it’s getting that initial burst of motivation going that is going to prove challenging, I feel.

My most positive experience with fitness was back when I worked at the Apple Store in WestQuay here in Southampton, and the gym and pool complex was both practically next door to where I worked, and on the way home. Consequently, it was pretty easy to just drop in, do some exercise either in the gym or the pool, then head home and have my whole evening ahead of me. It got me into good habits and made me feel reasonably good about the effort I was putting in — I’m not sure whether or not it actually helped me lose any weight, but part of it was just the mental wellbeing it brought about. I still wouldn’t have described myself as particularly “fit” but I was certainly a whole lot better than I am now.

The difficulty with being unfit is that it makes the process of actually getting fit infinitely more difficult to get started with. When it’s uncomfortable and painful to engage in exercise, the idea of voluntarily putting myself through that is not at the forefront of my mind. But I need to; hopefully it will be something that gets easier relatively quickly and helps me improve my motivation. Because right now there’s not a lot of it there — though some of that may be due to the fact that I don’t think I’m very well.

Going to get some good rest and then hopefully kick this thing off in earnest at some point in the next few days. I’m looking forward to having a swim, actually; it’s been quite a while since I had a good swim, and while I’m not very good at it — I’m painfully slow, even when doing “fast” strokes — I do find it to be quite a relaxing experience, so that could be the ideal thing to ease myself back into things.

Anyway, for now I’m off to bed. Apologies for the self-pitying nature of today’s post but, eh, you’re probably all used to it by now. G’night.

1278: Christopher Walkern

So the whole “go for a walk for some exercise” thing has been going pretty well. I’ve managed to get up early and get out every day since I said I was going to, which bodes well. I am, however, probably going to take the weekend off so I can enjoy a lie in.

I’ve been walking for at least an hour each day, usually covering a distance of just under 4 miles or so. I usually follow pretty much the same route — up the road to the Common, wiggle around a bit in this side of the Common, cut across, walk down the road into town, walk through the vaguely attractive parks on the edge of the city centre, walk past the station and back up the other end of my road to finish where I started. It’s a big loop, and there’s a mix of flat, uphill and downhill walking all the way, so there’s a bit of variety and challenge in places. It’s still relatively “leisurely” compared to gasping and wheezing my way through a run, though, which makes it infinitely more appealing for the moment even if it isn’t quite as good for me.

One of the helpful inspiring factors while I’ve been walking has been the use of audiobooks. I don’t normally listen to a lot of audiobooks or podcasts any more, because I don’t really have a suitable situation in which to listen to them. I can’t listen to them while I work, because I have proven to myself on numerous occasions that I absolutely, positively 100% cannot write anything more than notes while someone else is talking in the same room, whether they’re a real person or a recording. However, when all you’re doing is walking aimlessly for the purposes of exercise, an audiobook or podcast is ideal listening. You’re not running, so there’s no real need for some music with a sense of “pace” to it; you can take your time and take in the words of whatever it is you’re listening to.

The accompaniment to my walks this week has been the audiobook of a Dean Koontz novel. I had a couple of Koontz works recommended to me a while back and enjoyed them — I read those, rather than listened to them — so I decided to take a chance on another one. It’s a bit bigger of a “risk” to try out an audiobook, since they’re significantly more expensive than eBooks or even just, you know, books. Still, I haven’t been disappointed so far; the story is interesting and the narrator appears to be pretty good, too, which is nice. (The novel is “Lightning,” if you were wondering. I have no idea if this is considered “good” or not by Koontz fans, but I’m enjoying it.)

The other nice thing about audiobooks is the fact that it allows me to enjoy books without having to actually read them. I have nothing against reading and actually enjoy it rather a lot, but it’s quite hard to make time for it when I have lots of other things I want to do as well. Reading is something I like to do when it’s quiet — much like writing — so I can’t really do it in front of the TV, and I certainly can’t do it while I’m doing something else. Audiobooks allow me to enjoy a book while I’m doing something else, which is ideal.

So that’s that. I’ll be taking it easy for the weekend, then continuing this new regime next week. Let’s see if it helps at all.

1275: Got Out

I successfully put my proposed plan from yesterday’s post into action today. Now it is just a matter of sticking to it.

Walking isn’t as inherently satisfying as running, because it’s not as obviously tiring. But it’s still a reasonably good workout — Runkeeper assured me that I had burned a significant number of calories by the time I got back home. In total, I was out for just over an hour, and walked about 3.5 miles in total.

I’ve always been something of an indoor person, but I do like just going for a walk sometimes. This is a surprise to me, because the idea of “going for a walk” was bewilderingly ridiculous when I was young. Why, I thought, would you ever just go out with the intention of not actually going anywhere? Why, I pondered, would you ever just go out without a final destination in mind?

Well, now I’m a little older, I can appreciate the answers to those questions a little more: the reason you would do those things is simply to appreciate the things that are around you, and perhaps discover some interesting new things in the process.

I’m not sure when my attitudes changed on this note, but I have a feeling it was when I was forced to move back home for a while after my marriage broke down. Staying in the house just made me feel exceedingly depressed all the time, so I welcomed any excuse to get out and do something, even if that “something” wasn’t really anything in particular. I’d go out for a run around the area; I’d go out for a walk to the local woods; I’d walk out of the village by one road, all the way around its perimeter and re-enter from a completely different angle. In the process, I found myself exploring places that I’d either never been to before, or which I hadn’t been to for a significant number of years.

When I go out for a walk, I enjoy it when I can find myself surrounded by nature. Again, I note that I’ve never really been an outdoor person, but I do feel something of a curious affinity for the greenery of forests and otherwise wooded areas. I enjoy being under a canopy of leaves, sunlight dappled on the ground through the few breaks in the green ceiling above me. I enjoy the crunch of twigs and dead leaves underfoot as I walk down a dirt path; I enjoy seeing peculiar, twisted, gnarled trees that have grown in peculiar directions for reasons known only to themselves.

I’m reasonably fortunate where I am now because I’m pretty close to Southampton Common, which has a lot of greenery. There’s a lot of open space, too, what with it being a common and all, but there’s also plenty of wooded areas with well-worn pathways to explore. There’s also a creepy graveyard on the boundary which is interesting to wander through.

I’m going to try and get in the habit of going for a walk every morning if possible. It worked out quite well today — I got up early, went out, walked for an hour, got back, had breakfast, had time to chill out for half an hour, then started work, and I didn’t feel like I’d “wasted” any time. Whether or not I feel “better” is a matter of some debate, but I can’t really expect to feel significantly different after just one day, can I?

Well. Let’s stick with it and see what happens, anyway.

#oneaday Day 861: Cycle of Life

Today I took ownership of a shiny new bicycle. It is red.

Technically I took ownership of a shiny new bicycle (that was red) yesterday, but said shiny new bicycle was far too big for me, meaning that my testicles suffered considerable (and uncomfortable) compression when attempting to stand astride it, and making actually getting on to the saddle without looking like some sort of Special Person an impossible task. It didn’t do wonders for my confidence, so I took it back and exchanged it for a smaller one. Now I can ride it without feeling like I’m going to fall off. At least, not quite as much.

I haven’t ridden a bike for at least five years, I think. I used to do it a fair bit and have always enjoyed it, despite not being very good at it. I’m fairly clumsy and cack-handed and balance has never been a particularly strong point, meaning that I’m not very good at doing things like signalling, or riding without my hands clamped firmly to the handlebars. (Any tips for getting over that particular phobia are most welcome.) I’m also not particularly good at going uphill, changing gear (with either hand) or bumping up onto a pavement. But I can, at least, pedal, move forwards and stay upright without falling off into heavy traffic and dying, which is a start.

Cycling is good exercise. I’ve been doing a lot on the exercise bike at the gym recently — up to an hour at a time — and it got me thinking I should get back on the “real cycling” at some point, particularly as the weather is so nice at the moment. Observations so far are that real cycling is significantly more challenging than gym cycling (at least on the resistance level I’ve had it set at, it seems) but you get to be outside and have the nice feeling of the wind rushing past you, which is most pleasant and one of the reasons I’ve always enjoyed getting on a bike as a means of transportation and recreation.

That “transportation” part is a good thing about real cycling. At the gym, you pedal and pedal and pedal for hours and don’t go anywhere, you just make the little numbers on the screen go up. On a real bike, you can actually go somewhere that is too far away to walk. Granted, the speed at which I cycle probably isn’t significantly faster than walking (unless I’m going downhill) but at least it makes some places that were previously inaccessible without jumping in the car a little more, well, accessible. This is nice. I could probably even cycle to the gym if I tried hard enough, though I then have to consider the fact that I also have to cycle back after exerting myself lifting heavy things and/or all the other stuff I decide to torture myself with.

I would very much like to get fit and lose weight, as has probably been made clear numerous times on these very pages. The more alternative activities I have to help achieve that goal, the less likely (hopefully) I am to get demoralised or bored with the whole thing. I’m doing pretty well with watching what I eat and trying to get more exercise on a regular basis — this is just another means to that end. We’ll have to wait and see if it helps. Hopefully it will.

#oneaday Day 847: You Must be This Skinny to Ride

I’ve been going back and forth in my mind as to whether or not I should write about this, but given subjects I’ve happily covered in the past on this blog I figured what the hell. In for a penny, in for a pound, or something. Hopefully writing about this will prove cathartic, as I’ve been feeling fairly shitty for a fair chunk of the day.

Today, as you’ll know if you have read recent posts, Andie and I went to Alton Towers. I was looking forward to this a great deal, as it’s been a long time since I’d been and I was very curious about the new rides — as well as going on some old favourites.

All was going well. We’d been on the Runaway Mine Train, the Rapids, the Flume and an awesomely fun rollercoaster called Air that suspends you in a “lying down” position as if you’re flying like Superman, and we were having a great time.

Then I tried to go on Ripsaw. I had a feeling there might be trouble when the seats felt a bit small. I wasn’t expecting it to be quite so mortifying, however.

To cut a long story short, I had to get off the ride because I was too fat. The attendant didn’t use those words, obviously (if he had, I would have probably yelled more than a few obscenities at him and/or punched him) but there it was. Apparently the (already very tight on most people) safety harness thingies couldn’t be lowered enough on to me, so I had to get off. They gave me a “Priority Pass” to get on something else immediately, but guess what? All of the rides it covered also had very similar issues. I tried one and didn’t dare get on any others after that, as I was so upset.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt so humiliated as when I was getting off Ripsaw and walking across the front of the ride area towards the exit. I didn’t hear anyone laughing at me, but it didn’t matter. I was mortified. I was The Guy Who Was Too Fat To Ride. I won’t lie, it upset me enough to make me cry. I have issues with my body shape as it is, and to have it “confirmed” by strangers was just the worst feeling.

I am totally insecure in my body shape. I’m not what you’d call “massive” by any means. But I have quite a “solid” upper body. I hate it. I feel revulsion when I look at myself in the mirror. I wish I could just be happy in who I was, but when a day out is spoiled by your own fatness, it’s hard not to take it personally, particularly when you’re already made to feel like a social pariah by the way the world is set up.

Every time I see statistics about the number of obese people in the country, I feel bad. Every time someone on Twitter makes some judgemental comment about obese people, I get upset. I gave up on Wii Fit in the end because I was getting so demoralised every time I did the Body Test and it made my Mii swell up like a balloon. I’ve even been insulted by complete strangers in the past because of my weight. The world is set up to make me feel like Being Fat Is Bad and that I should Do Something About It.

Here’s the thing, though: I am doing something about it. I am going to the gym regularly, doing at least an hour of cardio every time (plus some weights work) and burning anywhere between 600 and 800 calories in a session. I am watching what I eat, counting calories and trying to make sure I have a deficit of a decent size, but not so much I’m starving myself. And still I feel like a societal reject because the weight is hard to get off. I wasn’t expecting it to be easy, but I would have expected to have at least a little impact by now. Perhaps it has and I just haven’t realised or noticed. But it’s incredibly demoralising when you discover that despite your best efforts, you’re Too Fat To Do That Thing You Like.

I’m really not sure what I can do beyond what I’m already doing — perhaps trying to up the intensity further on my workouts, and making sure I’m being as consistent and disciplined as possible. But my experience today made me feel like absolute shit about myself, through no-one’s fault in particular. Besides my own, I guess.

I’ve known people who were pretty large who successfully managed to lose a buttload of weight and completely change their body type. I feel jealous when I see those people, and I wonder if I’ll ever succeed. On days like today, it feels like it won’t ever happen.

I have calmed down a bit since earlier. Shit happens, and the rest of the day was fun. I am thirty-one years old, and Alton Towers probably wasn’t built with thirty-one year old men in mind. Perhaps I just need to let go of the past and do things that are more friendly to thirty-one year old men instead of stuff I was doing around half my lifetime ago. Going to the gym. Sitting in the jacuzzi at our hotel (so relaxing — just the thing after a stressful day). Hanging out with friends and playing board games. Playing Diablo III. Being at peace with oneself.

I’m not sure I’ll ever manage the last bit unless I successfully manage to shed a whole buttload of weight. I certainly intend to keep on trying, but you’ll forgive me if I have occasional lapses in hope for my long-term success.

Thank you for indulging me with this post. We’re off to the Alton Towers Water Park tomorrow, so hopefully that will be a much more fun day.