Exercise
I've been doing what for me is a lot of exercise recently.
Last Saturday: walked up Carn a'Chlamain near Blair Atholl with Philipp and Michael. We'd planned to cycle the 13km from the railway station to the mountain, but Scotrail had neglected to inform us that the train was being replaced with a bus service after Perth, so we had to leave our bikes in Perth station and walk in and out (though a very friendly man we met in the bus gave us a lift for the first couple of km). The walk, as it turned out, was very pleasant, and once we got onto the hill it was great - windy, but clear, with the first snow patches of the year. Just enough to make a couple of snow angels :-) On the way back we stopped in the excellent pub near the station for local beers and pheasant burgers. Unfortunately, we were forced to stay there longer than we'd have liked - the bus wasn't running to the same timetable as the train would have done (and the notice telling us this was conveniently tucked out of sight round a corner), so we missed it and had to spend another hour and a half in the pub.
Last Sunday: we'd missed our usual rock-climbing evening on Thursday to go and see the mountaineer Mick Fowler lecture about his latest exploits in China, so we made up the deficiency by getting a couple of hours in on Sunday instead at the climbing wall in Ibrox. Not much success, but still fun. And I had a go at the dry-tooling (climbing on rock using ice-axes) area downstairs: very, very tiring, but great fun.
Monday: Capoeira, for the first time in a while (a combination of illness and busyness having kept me away). Physically not so tiring as I'd remembered, making me think that at last I might be getting used to it.
Tuesday: slacked off.
Wednesday: Juggling, which does at least involve moving around :-)
Thursday: three-hour climbing session down at Ibrox, after which I was just drunk with exertion. I've been climbing for a few months now, since my colleague Stuart got back from Texas and showed me the basics, and though I feel like my climbing's got more elegant it hasn't translated into much ability to climb higher grades. But on Thursday I felt like I'd made some progress, and was climbing some routes I remembered having a lot of trouble with before. I had a go at some lead climbing (where you drag the rope up after you and clip into protection en-route rather than having the rope dangling down from a pulley above you), and had my first lead fall, swiftly followed by my second - I was pretty tired by that stage, and my fingers weren't working properly. It's all about learning to trust the rope, boys and girls...
Friday: double capoeira session. My optimism about my physical condition from Monday turned out to be totally unfounded - this was hard work. Everyone else obviously felt the same, because the second session, acrobatics and stretching, was a lot more laid-back. Afterwards, my body felt really good, like it had all been thoroughly used and broken in.
Saturday: slacked off. Unless you count lugging a 10kg sack of rice back from the Chinese supermarket :-)
Sunday: more hillwalking, this time up Meall nan Tarmachan near Killin. Philipp and I went with Bart, one of the new postgrads in the department, and owner of a car :-) We got a reasonably early start, and the walk wasn't too long: setting off from the car park at around 10, we were back well before 4pm. This time, the snow cover was a bit more serious: not thick, but it covered everything above about 900m. The cloud was low, too, and visibility was poor. Fortunately, the snow was thin enough that the path was still mostly visible, so we didn't need the compasses too much.
There's also the background hum of the Hacker's Diet's Canadian exercises (as of this morning, I'm now up to rung 14, but I'm doing double the number of press-ups). I miss the occasional day, particularly when I have to be up early in the morning, but I try not to.
More capoeira tonight, more climbing on Thursday, and maybe I'll go bouldering with the university Mountaineering Club tomorrow. We'll see. Somewhere between the weight loss and the increased exercise, my body's become a much more pleasant thing to inhabit in the last couple of months, but being lazy, I have an unfortunate tendency to seize on opportunities to slack off if I'm feeling even a little bit busy or down. I think the trick is getting myself to think of exercise as something that I enjoy for its own sake, rather than as something that stops me feeling grotty.
Last Saturday: walked up Carn a'Chlamain near Blair Atholl with Philipp and Michael. We'd planned to cycle the 13km from the railway station to the mountain, but Scotrail had neglected to inform us that the train was being replaced with a bus service after Perth, so we had to leave our bikes in Perth station and walk in and out (though a very friendly man we met in the bus gave us a lift for the first couple of km). The walk, as it turned out, was very pleasant, and once we got onto the hill it was great - windy, but clear, with the first snow patches of the year. Just enough to make a couple of snow angels :-) On the way back we stopped in the excellent pub near the station for local beers and pheasant burgers. Unfortunately, we were forced to stay there longer than we'd have liked - the bus wasn't running to the same timetable as the train would have done (and the notice telling us this was conveniently tucked out of sight round a corner), so we missed it and had to spend another hour and a half in the pub.
Last Sunday: we'd missed our usual rock-climbing evening on Thursday to go and see the mountaineer Mick Fowler lecture about his latest exploits in China, so we made up the deficiency by getting a couple of hours in on Sunday instead at the climbing wall in Ibrox. Not much success, but still fun. And I had a go at the dry-tooling (climbing on rock using ice-axes) area downstairs: very, very tiring, but great fun.
Monday: Capoeira, for the first time in a while (a combination of illness and busyness having kept me away). Physically not so tiring as I'd remembered, making me think that at last I might be getting used to it.
Tuesday: slacked off.
Wednesday: Juggling, which does at least involve moving around :-)
Thursday: three-hour climbing session down at Ibrox, after which I was just drunk with exertion. I've been climbing for a few months now, since my colleague Stuart got back from Texas and showed me the basics, and though I feel like my climbing's got more elegant it hasn't translated into much ability to climb higher grades. But on Thursday I felt like I'd made some progress, and was climbing some routes I remembered having a lot of trouble with before. I had a go at some lead climbing (where you drag the rope up after you and clip into protection en-route rather than having the rope dangling down from a pulley above you), and had my first lead fall, swiftly followed by my second - I was pretty tired by that stage, and my fingers weren't working properly. It's all about learning to trust the rope, boys and girls...
Friday: double capoeira session. My optimism about my physical condition from Monday turned out to be totally unfounded - this was hard work. Everyone else obviously felt the same, because the second session, acrobatics and stretching, was a lot more laid-back. Afterwards, my body felt really good, like it had all been thoroughly used and broken in.
Saturday: slacked off. Unless you count lugging a 10kg sack of rice back from the Chinese supermarket :-)
Sunday: more hillwalking, this time up Meall nan Tarmachan near Killin. Philipp and I went with Bart, one of the new postgrads in the department, and owner of a car :-) We got a reasonably early start, and the walk wasn't too long: setting off from the car park at around 10, we were back well before 4pm. This time, the snow cover was a bit more serious: not thick, but it covered everything above about 900m. The cloud was low, too, and visibility was poor. Fortunately, the snow was thin enough that the path was still mostly visible, so we didn't need the compasses too much.
There's also the background hum of the Hacker's Diet's Canadian exercises (as of this morning, I'm now up to rung 14, but I'm doing double the number of press-ups). I miss the occasional day, particularly when I have to be up early in the morning, but I try not to.
More capoeira tonight, more climbing on Thursday, and maybe I'll go bouldering with the university Mountaineering Club tomorrow. We'll see. Somewhere between the weight loss and the increased exercise, my body's become a much more pleasant thing to inhabit in the last couple of months, but being lazy, I have an unfortunate tendency to seize on opportunities to slack off if I'm feeling even a little bit busy or down. I think the trick is getting myself to think of exercise as something that I enjoy for its own sake, rather than as something that stops me feeling grotty.