Tag Archives: fitness

Illness and fitness

In the year before Emily was born, I was ill approximately zero times. I was in fairly rigorous training for the half marathon, running between 15 and 40 km per week for about 6 months of the year and I’d managed a reasonably healthy diet throughout the period as well.

In the 15 months since she’s arrived, the commute, working hours, and general apathy has seen all that fall to one side – I haven’t been on a run since June and my diet’s been all over the place. In the last six months or so, this has started to hit me from a cold/flu perspective, and whilst some of this is no doubt exposure to a Nursery-going toddler, I can’t help but think that there’s been a direct correlation between my fitness level and how often I’ve gotten ill.

With my recent NY resolutions, the diet (and some) fitness training has resumed, but I’ve already gotten ill  (not sure where from!) and am self-pityingly recovering from it now. At least I’ve maintained the diet (as it happens, the constant ingestion of strepsils makes most other food taste somewhat unappealing, so it actually helped!), but the 100 push-up / 200 sit-up programme may need to be restarted next week…

Hopefully a more determined, consistent fitness effort will see me steer clear of the sniffles in 2012!

Having targets

I’ve talked before about the need to have achievable targets for weight loss, and have set any number of arbitrary goals to help motivate me. There are a few that are coming, metric and imperial, spurious and otherwise.

If I lose 1lbs, I will be below 13 st for the first time in years.

If I lose 2lbs, I will drop below 180lbs for the first time in I don’t know how long.

If/when I lose approx 3.5kg more, I will be a ‘Light Heavyweight‘ for the first time in years. I will also have lost 20% of my body mass this year.

If I lose 4-5kg more, I will happily be in the ‘ideal’ weight class on the BMI scale (pre-wedding target) – no longer overweight!

If I lose 14lbs, I’ll be under 12 stone for the first time in forever.

If I lose 8 kg, I’ll be a super-middleweight.

If I lose 10kg, I’ll be a middleweight.

If I lose 11kg, I’ll be in the middle of my ideal weight band (post-honeymoon goal), and I’ll shift into maintenance gear.

It’s incredibly satisfying to have Wii Fit display the message “you have lost 1 st and 8 lbs”… of course, I haven’t been using it often and I had gained the excess weight to begin with, but gradually getting there…

Cannot tell you how much I am looking forward to no longer being on a diet…

iPhone fitness training

Letting my iPhone dictate a chunk of my life right now.

Twohundredsitups tells me what I’m doing on Tues, Thurs & Sat mornings
hundredpushups tells me what I’m doing Mon, Weds, Fri mornings
Couch25k tells me when to run and walk three days a week
Dailyburn’s new iPhone app tells me how much I can eat

Anything else I should be doing?

Last night an iPhone saved my life…

(Amanda’s not impressed at how much time I spend listening to the iPhone. Ah well, no binary solo just yet…)

Pool meetings

When in Bath the other weekend, the commentary on the free audioguide at the baths suggested that “the tradition of doing business in baths has died out in the Western Europe and America”… which struck me as odd at the time, but I thought maybe I’d just seen too many mafia movies. Then today, whilst trying to maintain my exercise routine, I kept swimming into a crowd of Spaniards congregating at one end of the slow lane of the gym’s pool, who were, erm, having some kind of meeting. It was a bit bizarre, and I didn’t see the appeal…

Fitness fan

…I’m not. I enjoy sport, but not generally exercise per se… but the recent membership of a new, non-council (and therefore slightly posh, nice and warm) gym has opened me up to the possibility that I enjoy swimming for the first time since I was a kid excited about going to Lake Club in KL (where there were also Water Slides, to be fair!).

So this was how I came to be swimming lengths and lengths of the gym the morning after Amanda’s birthday, and live to tell the tale. It’s true – the first two weeks ARE the hardest, then things start to feel more natural… let’s see if I can sustain this.