Exercise

[pozorvlak]

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.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I've not been climbing in ages, I miss it. I've never had the nerves to try lead climbing yet though, and I've been doing it on and off (in the last couple of years, mostly off) for about three years, so I'm envious of your bravery after a few months!

[wholepint.livejournal.com]

Sorry that was me. Having a typical brain-switched off Monday.

[susannahf.livejournal.com]

I feel like a complete slob now...
My recent excuse has been that if walking from Little Clarendon St to Keble Road is enough to make me wheeze, then I probably shouldn't be doing "exercise" unless I want to see the inside of a big white taxi. Happily, that's (mostly) not true now, but I've now got completely out of my routine, and have to get over the fear thing to get going again.

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

That's a particularly healthy week, bear in mind. On any given week I'll slack off on some or all of those exercise commitments (or be unable to find anyone to go hillwalking with - I don't like the idea of going on my own from a safety point of view). Last week, all the coins came up heads :-)

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

My recent excuse has been that if walking from Little Clarendon St to Keble Road is enough to make me wheeze, then I probably shouldn't be doing "exercise" unless I want to see the inside of a big white taxi.

I don't know how your asthma affects things, but I would have thought that that's exactly backwards. If a walk that short makes you wheeze, then you need to do more exercise, not less - but start small. Walk, don't run. Try the low rungs of the Hacker's Diet programme. Go for a walk round the park in your lunch break. Play table-tennis. I dunno, find something you enjoy :-)

[susannahf.livejournal.com]

Well, yes and no.
What you say would be generally true, but the reason that I was wheezing wasn't unfitness. It was acute airway hypersensitivity (exercise/cold air/illness making my airways close up). Exercise won't help this, and may even make it worse. I think you're meant to aim for whatever you can do without needing rescue treatment. If that's walking a short distance, you are Sick and need better treatment, not more exercise. In fact, there is little to no evidence that I've found that implies that exercise helps asthma at all beyond the general benefits of losing weight.
Of course, it does help in other ways, but it's quite depressing to know that in all likelihood, I could be as fit as an athlete and still get floored by a minor viral infection.

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Ah, right. Nasty.

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

BTW, my friend Mat claims that cycling face-masks help with the breathing-cold-air problem; he uses them for cycling (AFAIK he's not asthmatic), but it might help with the airway hypersensitivity. He recommends these (http://www.respro.com/sportsleisure_street.php).

[susannahf.livejournal.com]

They certainly do, although a comfortable, reasonably thick scarf over mouth and nose do as well - by passing the air through a warm object (warmed by skin/expired air). I have a homemade one - a double layer of fleece fastened at the back by velcro, which works wonderfully even if it does make me look like a complete wally.

[necaris.livejournal.com]

Ooh, Hacker's Diet! I had not heard of this!

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

The Hacker's Diet is made of awesome - it's the diet that I've been (approximately) following since about July, with the result that I've lost nearly two stone. It's actually more of a metadiet, because it's based on the idea that it doesn't much matter what you eat provided the calorific content is low enough. The actual meal planning and decisions are left up to you, giving you the freedom to design a diet that fits the way you eat and which you have a chance of sticking to. The book provides the tools you'll need to do this, to fine-tune your plan once it's underway and you start to gather data, and provides some advice on retaining motivation and sticking to the diet. It's very grown-up: if you want that piece of chocolate cake, then have it, but you'll have to pay for it either by slower rate of weight loss or by making up the calories elsewhere.

The book (free, online, linked above) is very good and well worth reading, but I've also written a summary (http://pozorvlak.livejournal.com/63230.html#cutid1) which you might find useful.

A word of warning: if you tell people you're on a diet, they will immediately chime in with their opinion, which is reasonably likely to be totally idiotic and completely unsupported by any evidence. Pure calorie-counting diets seem to attract particular ire. If I've learned anything from the last four months, it's to remain calm in the face of the opinions of others and stick to my guns.

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks! I really like the approach Walker gives in his intro: taking losing weight as an engineering problem! There was a period when I was in high school when I lost some weight pretty successfully but I then promptly put the weight back on again, slowly, and I've not managed since. People keep telling me of the joys of exercise, and the only exercise I've managed to stick to in the recent past is my current 35-minute walk to work (getting harder to stick to in the utterly miserable weather these days).

(It's entirely possible I'd start losing weight without even trying by the simple expedient of giving up Dr Pepper, but I'm not sure I want to -- and I quite like the "grown-up" way of treating it as a credit in the calorie column and accounting for it in other ways!)

[necaris.livejournal.com]

Oops -- that was me!

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

There's a lot of it about, these days.

Dr Pepper: it's possible that's all you'd need. On the other hand, maybe that would just be enough to stop you gaining more weight, but not enough for you to lose any of the weight you already have. I found that giving up alcohol was not enough for me to lose any weight on its own, but it is pretty much essential for any serious weight-loss to occur - not only is alcohol calorific, it makes you hungrier and less likely to care about the diet.

Some people find it easier to exercise than diet. I'm not one of them, and it sounds like you aren't either. But bear in mind that losing weight will make exercising significantly easier and more fun :-)