#oneaday Day 673: Journey, not destination

The advice "it's about the journey, not the destination" is valid in a lot of contexts, but I find that there's a very literal reading of it that I find particularly worthwhile. And that is when it comes to taking some exercise, particularly if you are not someone who is generally inclined towards such things.

Since the weather has turned nice, I've gone out for a couple of walks. I had a short walk on the common the other day, and this morning after breakfast, I decided to just leave my house, set off in whatever direction I felt like, and just keep walking. I ended up having a very lovely walk of approximately 5 kilometres, burning a nice number of calories due having to haul my disgusting fat carcass around with me wherever I go, and coming home feeling rather satisfied with myself.

What I discovered along the way is that on the outward journey, when I didn't have a particular destination in mind, I felt like I could pretty much go forever. I kept walking and walking and walking until I had got quite a distance away from my house. And I was enjoying it; I found some nice little scenic areas, even, which you will see photographs of punctuating this blog post. It's always nice when you find pleasant green areas within a reasonably sized and generally quite busy city.

The moment I felt like I was "on the way back", though, things became several orders of magnitude more difficult. It's weird! It was like a switch flipped in my mind, a big countdown appeared (figuratively speaking), and I was aware of quite how far I still had left to go before I could call proceedings to a halt. I had to take several breaks on this "return leg" of the journey, because I kept getting to points where I felt like I wanted to get home, but also where I wasn't sure I had the energy to make it all the way back without stopping.

Okay, it doesn't help that we live on top of a hill, and thus whichever direction I set out from when I go for a walk, I always have to end my journey by climbing a hill that might not look that steep, but which is always absolutely exhausting to walk up. Well, it is if you're a fat shit like me, anyway.

Still, I feel like if I had just kept walking "outwards", I could have probably made it even further afield. Could I have made it into the town centre? I don't know — maybe. I wasn't far off making it to one of the local shopping areas. And if I had made it there, I could have always stopped for a coffee and then even got the bus back home if I had really wanted to.

Perhaps that's the answer. Just walk and walk and walk outwards, then for the return journey catch the bus. Is that cheating? I don't think it is, is it? Not if you are able to make the outward journey significantly longer as a result of knowing that you're not going to have to walk back again.

Maybe I'll try that next time out. I just need to familiarise myself with the bus routes around the area, I guess!

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#oneaday Day 542: Vrr vrr vrr

I didn't buy much in the Black Friday sales this year. In fact, I only bought one "thing" and one Steam game (Mini Motorways, which is lovely).

The "thing" I bought is an under-desk elliptical trainer thing, ostensibly for "seniors", but also, I figured, eminently suitable for someone like me who needs to get some exercise, but has difficulty with the whole "motivating oneself to go outside the house" thing for various reasons.

Also I wanted something that would allow me to give my legs in particular a bit of gentle exercise, and that I could use while doing other things, and that wouldn't be discouragingly difficult to use for someone as unfit as I am.

I forget exactly how I ended up looking at these things. I do know that the first product I saw was a vibrating foot massager thing that supposedly "mimicked the motion of walking", but just looked hilarious to see people using in the promotional videos. From there, it recommended me these under-desk elliptical doodads, and from there I picked one that 1) had good reviews and 2) wasn't obscenely expensive, and now here we are, with me the proud owner of a Lubbygim [sic] Under Desk Elliptical Machine Quiet Motorized Leg Exerciser with Smart Remote, 12-Speed Manual Programs Auto/3 Auto Programs LCD Display & Bidirectional Motion for Home/Office.

Yes, as that absurd product name will probably tell you, I was shopping on Amazon. As loathe as I am to further line the pockets of billionaires and contribute to the exploitation of workers, they had something I was looking for, offered it at a good price and got it to me in good time. So /shrug, I guess.

And the thing seems pretty good! Its supposedly "non-slip" feet do, in fact, slip, so I have paired it with a non-slip mat (which also slips, but less than the feet did) and installed it under my working desk, so now I can make use of it during the working day, on my lunch break and any time I'm just sitting in my study doing things. The way I have it set up makes it ideal for using while watching a long YouTube video or TV programme.

It's a fairly no-frills device. As the ridiculous product name suggests, it has a fully manual mode where you can control the speed and direction of the pedals, and also three automatic modes that vary the speed and direction over the course of a half-hour programme. I'm not entirely sure if the three different programmes are supposed to be varying degrees of "difficulty" or intensity, but I'm assuming they are; I did a "programme 3" earlier and it seemed to spend a lot more time at the higher speeds than the rather gentle "programme 1".

What I like about it is that it's easy to just stick on and let your legs do the walking while you forget about it. This, to me, is the optimal way to exercise; the absolute worst thing you can do while attempting to get some exercise is to watch the clock, because that's what makes a ten-minute session on a treadmill feel like you're hiking up Mount Everest. With this thing being the way it is, though, today I've found it absolutely easy to put in nearly two hours of wibbling my legs around a bit in total. And that, I hope, will be beneficial in the long term.

I'm under no illusions: this thing doesn't offer an intense enough workout to really play any significant role in exercise for weight loss, but that's not why I wanted one of these. I just wanted something that would get my legs moving a bit, because I spend all day sitting working, and all night sitting entertaining myself, and frankly my legs are old and stupid enough to have started going "nope, not having that" any time I want to get up and actually do something. And I don't like that. It worries me a bit; I don't want to end up in a situation where I just can't use my legs. I'm pretty certain that it wouldn't come to that without some sort of drastic accident, but I also don't want to put myself in a position where it's even a slight possibility.

And so sticking this thing on and going vrr vrr vrr for at least half an hour every day is my way of preventing that. Hopefully, anyway. It's only been two days so far, so I'm not entirely sure I'm feeling any specific benefit just yet, but over the long term, I hope it will help me be even a little bit more active — or I'd settle for it just helping my knees hurt a little bit less.

See that? Personal growth, that is. Probably.

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#oneaday Day 482: Among the dead

I got off my arse and went for a walk this evening. I'm going to try and make a bit more of a habit of this. I know I have said this before, but since I am starting to see some success in establishing the good habits necessary for weight loss, I should get some exercise in there too, as that will help with the whole calorie deficit thing, as well as getting my body generally moving and hopefully a bit less stiff (not in a good way) than it has been for the last [x] years.

I mostly like going for a walk, even if in my current state I am painfully slow at getting anywhere, particularly if there is any sort of incline whatsoever. The annoying thing about where we live is that we're sort of at the top of a hill, so whichever direction I set off in to go for a walk, inevitably at least some of the way back involves going uphill to varying degrees.

I've tried a few different routes on various occasions, and the most… acceptable I have found strikes a good balance between being reasonably picturesque (a significant portion of it involves walking through the local cemetery, which, although maudlin, is also quite pleasant and peaceful), being a decent distance to get some reasonably good exercise out of, and not having overly difficult changes in elevation for my battered and broken body to have to contend with.

I find cemeteries quite interesting. I often find myself looking at the graves; part of me wonders if I'll see a name I recognise, but the rest of my brain explains that is fairly unlikely. As such, I find my own life briefly touching the fleeting existences of complete strangers and pondering their circumstances, and what kind of people they were. Sometimes there are clearly tragic stories, such as the extremely ornate memorial which had been raised to a baby who lived less than an hour. At others, there is clearly family history, with little quotes and well-wishes from people — usually couples. Sometimes it's just a simple expression of remembrance, such as with the rather out-of-place looking grave with the simple wooden cross marking its location, surrounded by more elaborate marble headstones.

Supposedly Benny Hill is buried in that cemetery. I didn't go looking for him; I just remember happening to notice his name marked on Google Maps when I was pondering a route to take before I left.

I thought about getting some sort of fitness tracker up and running before going, but then the part of my brain that is specifically trying to disconnect from stuff like that took over and reminded me that I don't need or even want "numbers" — the important thing is just getting out and doing it. Yes, yes, I know we're all supposed to do 10,000 steps a day, but all I find when introducing metrics into the mix is added anxiety. Just get out there, do the thing and be happy that you did it.

So I did!

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#oneaday Day 347: The pump

I've gone to the gym for the last two days in a row! Go me. I think I will probably take tomorrow off, but I went yesterday of my own volition and today to make up for the bratwurst we had for dinner, since I'm counting calories at the moment.

I go back and forth on my feelings towards the gym. There are times when I resent "having" to go (and, honestly, with the state my body's been in for a while, I do "have" to go) but there are times like the last couple of days when I actually feel like it's quite a pleasant experience. And it's for different reasons at different times.

Yesterday, I was feeling a bit down and miserable; I was having one of those evenings where I spent several hours not really doing anything worthwhile, and got to about 9pm feeling frustrated at how I had wasted the evening. So I decided that rather than sit around continuing to do nothing, I would do something productive and go to the gym. I dug out my cheap-ass wireless earbuds that don't really block out any external sound but which are adequate enough for listening to podcasts or YouTube videos, queued up a video I'd half-watched earlier, then went to the gym and did 20 minutes on the treadmill followed by about 30 minutes of resistance stuff on the machines.

And y'know what? I felt pretty damn good afterwards. My mood had lifted and I didn't feel anywhere near as frustrated as I'd felt prior to leaving the house. I'd still wasted a good few hours of the evening, of course, but it didn't feel like it mattered (because, let's face it, it doesn't, really) — and anyway, I'd made up for it by going and doing something that officially falls into the category of Bettering Oneself.

This evening, meanwhile, I had made myself a little anxious by knowingly going over the calorie limit I'm supposed to be following with dinner, but then I recalled the calorie consumption I had recorded from yesterday's session, realised that this would more than make up for the "overspill", and resolved to go and have a decent session. Once again, I got the shitty wireless earbuds and set the latest Giant Bombcast to playing while on the treadmill, and managed 30 minutes without too much difficulty. It normally takes me quite a while to muster the motivation to do more than 10 minutes on the treadmill, but today it was easy.

It's all about how you occupy your mind while you're doing those exercises, I think. At least, it is for me. If I'm just walking on the treadmill and I don't have anything to distract me from the tedium of the endeavour, even just 10 minutes feels like an absolute eternity. But if I have something compelling, interesting or just plain amusing to listen to while I'm doing the tedious thing, the time passes way faster, because I'm simply not paying attention to the time.

It's the same phenomenon we found in secondary school German classes. We spent so much time clockwatching in those lessons that they felt five times longer than any other lesson we had at school — one time I really freaked my friend out by using the countdown timer on my Casio watch to make it look like time really was running backwards — but if they had been a tad more engaging and interesting, I'm sure they wouldn't have felt as long. No disrespect to my German teachers, who were doing their best, but National Curriculum and GCSE-level German are set up to not be very interesting and engaging to study. At least, they weren't when I was at school.

So yes. I think the secret of gym success is to have something to occupy your ears and, in the case of the treadmill, your eyes, too. If you're looking at a screen to watch a video, you're not watching the clock. Bonus points if your gym's treadmill has an arrangement where you can physically block the clock screen with your phone or tablet. Or just lay your towel over the top, I guess.

Anyway, like I say, probably going to have a day off tomorrow 'cause my muscles are a bit sore after two days of pumping it (at weakling levels) in a row. But, so long as I continue to have good stuff to put in my eyes and ears while doing the boring bits, I think I might be able to keep this up for a bit. Let's see how it goes.

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#oneaday Day 267: Do some exercise

For a little while, my left knee has been absolutely killing me. It hurt to bend it, it hurt to kneel down, it was even quite painful extending and bending my leg to go up and down stairs. It was getting so painful that I was reaching a point where I was genuinely quite concerned I had somehow fucked it up beyond all hope of recovery despite not having actually done anything to it other than "be fat".

Taking advantage of a brief (brief) moment of motivation earlier today, I decided to set up the treadmill my wife bought a little while back, and which the pair of us have failed to make good use of since it arrived in the house and we realised we don't really have a super-convenient place to keep it. I plonked it down in front of the living room TV (where it just about fits between the sofa and the media cabinet) and plugged its ridiculously short cable into an extension, then into the wall. Then I set it going at a gentle 3.5 speed (mph, I presume) and just did ten minutes while I watched a bit of an episode of Friends.

When I got off, my knee wasn't in agony any more. It's still a little bit painful, but it's not at the "oh my God, are they actually going to have to chop my leg off?" level of pain it has been in the last week. So I am forced to conclude that after many, many years of a largely sedentary lifestyle, my body is finally reaching a point where it is literally screaming out for me to do some exercise. Which is nice.

I joke, but it sort of is nice to have some actual, unavoidable motivation for doing some exercise. I'm not averse to the idea at all — numerous gym memberships, periods of going swimming regularly and even just about surviving a 10K in the pre-COVID days will attest to this — but summoning up the motivation in the last five years has been really difficult, particularly if "doing some exercise" involves putting in some effort before you can even start — getting equipment out, getting changed, rearranging a room or driving to the gym.

But the treadmill, currently propped up against the wall in our living room, is reasonably easy to set up — I just have to move the coffee table out of the way, plug it in and we're away. So I'm going to start doing just a little bit every day. Just ten minutes at a time to begin with, as I don't want to overwhelm myself and kill off that motivation before it leads to any sort of productive gain in ability level or fitness. Just ten minutes of putting these tired old legs to a bit of use, and apparently that works wonders.

Who knew? Everyone did, of course, but sometimes it helps to have a little reminder that people who tell you to get some exercise aren't just talking out their arse or trying to get you to do something you don't want to do. It actually, really does help. So I'm hoping starting slow will help with the feelings of physically painful lethargy that have been becoming increasingly apparent since COVID. And we'll see how things go from there.

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#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.

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#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.

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#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!

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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.