Tag: Running

  • ODDS and ENDS: Walking to Success, Sprung Spring, and Jeans

    ODDS and ENDS: Walking to Success, Sprung Spring, and Jeans

    (Make you come home early…)

    So… I’m back to the gym. I have been off of it since October, and my body is showing it. I have a little belly now, which is really wanting to become a bigger belly. No real surprise, I have let myself go for the past five months. But not any longer. Back to the gym, and my plan is to follow the same pattern as before; a pattern that garnered positive results for me. Thirty minutes a day for five days a week, aiming to get two miles in on the treadmill. And since I am a middle aged man, I know that I have to work my way up to running the whole thirty minutes. So, I do a brisk walk for now, then I will start running for a few minutes, and alternate back to walking. Slowly, I’ll start running more than walking, getting to the point where I walk the first three minutes, jog the next twenty-four, and do a cool down walk of three minutes. I’m on week two of being back to the gym, and I’m still walking for the time being (Next week we start jogging for a few minutes) but is there a way to just walk my way to losing ten pounds? Better yet, is there a way I can just lay on the couch and… well… just lay on the couch because I hate going to the gym, and none of it is fun for me. But… I want to be healthy, so I have to suck it up…

    No one cares about the second Spring day, which is effectively what yesterday was. It was 72 out in the City. It was great out, but it was the second day of Spring and no one cared. See, that first day of Spring, when it gets to the upper 60’s for the first time, everyone and their dog is out. I love how there are the super ambitious people who are dying for Spring and Summer to show up, to the point that they are running around in shorts, t-shirt and sandals as if it was a Summer day. More importantly, that first day of Spring has a feeling of relief and joy that Winter is finally coming to an end; that we have made it through the darkness and better times are ahead. The second Day of Spring is more about people complaining that they out on the wrong coat in the morning.

    There is one sure fire way to acknowledge that I am getting older, and that has to do with decreased amount of time that I wear jeans. There was a time, say from the age of ten to twenty-five, when I would have worn a pair of jeans everyday. Even in Summer, and I used to live in Texas. I lived in jeans. And over this time frame, I did own other pants, like khakis and such, and for shits and giggles I might wear them out, but on the whole, jeans as far as the eye can see. Then I graduated college, and had to go get a job, and the dominance of jeans began to wane in my life, well, at least between the hours of 8am to 6pm, Monday through Friday. Nothing but jeans, in different colors (Blue, dark blue, light blue, and black) and styles (Baggy and Straight) and brands (Levi’s and Old Navy). Now that I am older, sensible slacks seem sensible, and wearing pants that seem appropriate for the season I’m in also is a very logical proposition.

    (P.S. – The AI Image Creator is an RFK Jr. Fan, as It Thinks I Work Out in Jeans)

  • The Bored Days of Summer (Unedited)

    We got three days into Summer Vacation, and the kid announced that she was bored.

    “There’s nothing to do”

    “No one to talk to”

    “Nothing to watch”

    “Nothing to read”

    “Nothing to listen to”

    I think you get the idea.

    Not surprised to hear her say this. All kids get bored when they have too much time on their hands. When the get too much freedom, it becomes repressive. As I am the stay at home dad, I get the brunt of the kid’s complaints, and she looks to me to solve this problem of hers.

    My first reaction was to tell her that it’s not my job to eliminate her boredom.

    But as soon as I said that, it dawned on me that it really is my job to end her boredom. Look, if I don’t get involved then she will want to zombie out on the iPad, and that is the worst thing that could happen.

    I’m not saying that she won’t get on the iPad this Summer, but I want to limit that as much as possible.

    Now, I don’t want to create mindless things for her to do, such as dumping a bunch of chores on her. There is no joy or magical memories that come from that. No, what I want to do is encourage healthy habits while also spending time together. (She will help me paint the livingroom this Summer, so she does have one huge chore, but we’ve been talking about that for months now.) I want her to stay active, so we are going to go running, and work on her soccer skills. I also want to keep her reading up, so we need to set time aside for that. She’s brought up that she wants to go to a museum, so that will take care of the art side of things. And I want to encourage her to think about the food she wants to learn how to make, and then we can work on recipe testing.

    IN the end, what I know to be true is that you only get to have so many Summers as a kid. When the days are hot but not too hot, and the Summer feels like it stretches on forever. In two or three years, I really won’t see her over the Summer, as she’ll be involved in something, or will be hanging out with her friends. Until then, I want to make sure she has some memories of enjoying time with her dad. Doing stupid stuff while trying to avoid being bored.

  • I Went to the Gym Today

    I sure did. I went to the gym. I had this thought in my head that I wanted to add a fourth day of gymming to my life. (I have decided that “gymming” is a word, and that it is spelled with two m’s.) I don’t know what came over me last night, but as I was going to bed, I said to myself, I can go to the gym on Tuesday, and now work out four days a week.

    See, at least since 2022, I have been going to the gym three days a week, Wednesday thru Friday. The thought here was that Monday and Tuesday were dedicated to doing all of the stay at home dad stuff. Not that there weren’t other stay at home dad stuff things to do during the rest of the week, but Wednesday, Thursday and Friday were my days to work on my stuff – writing, art, time with the kid, and those were my gym days, too. On the whole, it’s been working fine.

    But of late, I have started to think that I could and should be doing more. I could be writing more, working on more projects, doing more around the house, more work on our family’s finances. And that just led me to think that I could do another day at the gym. I would find an extra hour, somewhere, and wedge in some treadmill time.

    There is a very important fact here, you need to remember – I hate working out. I equate the gym to eating your vegetables as a kid – you don’t like it, but you know you need to do it. That’s the gym for me. My doctor told me that as I get older I need to do at least 30 minutes of cardio workouts, three times a week. So, I have been doing that. Eating my vegetables and staying in the good graces of the doctor and the wife. Don’t get me wrong, I want to be healthy, and have as much time with my wife, kid, friends and family as possible. If I could do that without the gym, I would, you know.

    So, for this thought of adding a gym day, to do extra gymming, seemed surprising to me. And I was surprised that I was open to this idea. That I woke up this morning thinking that it was still a good idea. That I put on the running gear and headed out to the gym, got on the treadmill, and was surprised at how fast the time flew.

    I don’t want to get ahead of myself here, but I might be making a positive change here.

  • ODDS and ENDS: I Want to Go to the Gym, The Greatest Upset in Cricket World Cup History, and Mowing the Lawn

    (If there is a remedy, I will run from it)

    Today, honestly, was the first day in my life wherein when I woke up, and I had a desire to go to the gym. Not sure what is happening to me. I hate going to the gym, or at least I did. Yet, running on the treadmill for 30 minutes sounds enjoyable. Crap! I think I might be changing for the better.

    Did you know that the Men’s Cricket World Cup is underway? Did you know that the US is the host country? did you know that the USA has a team? Would you believe that the USA is not ranked very high in the world, and is not considered a serious competitive team? Would you believe that low ranked Team USA beat the 6th ranked powerhouse team from Pakistan yesterday? Yeah, neither did I! This is actually a very big deal in the Cricketing world, and I feel that out of National Pride we should be celebrating this! As such, here is your 2024 USA Men’s National Cricket Team:

    I never really minded the chore of mowing the yard. My Dad would make me do it, and I think at first it was like a punishment. But I had a walkman and lots of tapes, so it became a time for me to zone out and fall into my music. If I remember correctly, I could mow the front and back yard in thirty minutes, but it was Texas, so in the summer I either had to mow in the morning, or at the very edge of dusk. I don’t know if I will ever own a house, but if I do, I am looking forward to taking care of a yard.

  • Working Out Together

    Who does this? I’m not judging; just wondering if I know any friends, couples actually, who go and workout together? I see this couple activity depicted in tv and movies, and there sure does seem to be a great number of people on social media presenting videos of them and their significant other lifting weights, running, or drinking protein shakes together. They seem to be enjoying each other’s company. Now and then, at the gym or in the park, I will see a couple running together, so I know it happens.

    The reason I ask is that the wife and I might start working out together. OR to be more accurate, both of us will be in the gym at the same time. See, I run and the wife does yoga. Recently, after a back issue, her doctor suggested that she might want to start lifting some weights. She does have a membership to the gym I go to, a perk of her job, so she thought that we should go together on the same day… you know, to help motivate each other.

    I’m not opposed to this idea. I just never saw us as a workout couple on our life BINGO card. When this happens at the gym, she’ll go to her weight machine, and I’ll head to the treadmill. After thirty minutes, we’ll leave together. Maybe we’ll talk about “gains” but I doubt it.

    And I would say that this is the unexpected path that middle-aged life is taking us on. I still hate working out, but I at least know that working out 30 minutes a day, five days a week, can have a huge positive impact on your health. So, I’m not stupid. It’s just not my favorite thing to do. Call it an “eating your vegetable” problem – I know it’s good for me.

    I never really thought about what being middle aged would be like, because I never really thought that I’d be middle aged. Not that I would die young or anything like that; I just never thought about being bald, with a little tummy pudge, worrying about retirement and the cost of college for the kid. Thinking about my life with the wife, I just assumed we’d get older, but look the same, and drink and smoke, eat food we want to eat, never change, and and stay up late every night.

    Didn’t turn out that way. I’m not unhappy about the way things worked out; most of it is pretty great. But now I have things in my life that I want to spend as much time with as possible, and though it’s like fighting the tide, if I can snatch some extra time, I will.

    So, we’re going to the gym together.