Project 365. Day 2.

01-02-2010

As usual (no laughs, this is really sad) I decided to wake up at 7-7:30am, so I can spend some time reading before my Aikido class. Of course, I woke up only at 9am, which left me just 15 minutes before I had to leave the house. Since my dojo is not that far from my house  (maybe around 10 minutes walk) I decided that I will walk instead of driving. I really need to walk more to get my daily goal of 10000 steps (according to my FitBit; I will tell you about it below). Walking is actually a good thing. Americans (except New-Yorkers) spend too much time driving

I haven’t been training for almost 3 weeks due to holidays, work etc, so while Saturday morning is not my usual class, I was eager to go. I realized that if I miss my classes I pretty much physically can feel it as a sense of discomfort and messed up energy level. Well, this morning I was very disappointed by myself. Two times during the exercise I almost fainted out and have had to stop and sit for 3-5 minutes, catching my breath and lowering the heartrate. It’s not like I was doing something unusual, but this wasn’t a beginners class and intensity of exercises was much higher than my regular beginners classes. From XP gathering I like this, but I need to be in much better physical shape in order to survive more serious classes. This is something I really need to work on during 2010. I am not in a bad shape, compared to the rest of men of my age, but I should target top 5%, not just above average.

And yet, returning from the dojo tired and angry at myself, I felt genuinely happy.

Now, speaking of FitBit. It was my small present to “dear me” lately. I first heard of this device more than year ago, when it was one of the finalists of TechCrunch 50. They were going to release it at the beginning of the 2009, but for some reason it went live only recently. Mine was pre-ordered, so I guess I’ve got my device from the first shipment. Basically, it’s an advanced pedometer that tracks your movements through the day (and the night) and reports the results back to their web-based app, so you can track how physically active you are, how many steps you have made, how many calories burned and even how long and how well you slept. To be honest, I was a little bit disappointed for some reason I expected a little bit more sophistication from it, but it’s OK as is. If you are like me and mostly sit through the day, then every little nudge towards a physical activity helps. Here’s a snapshot of my day:

In fact, you can drill down to lots of other information and they even have some rudimentary community elements. I think there’s a lot of room for improvement, but even now it’s pretty fun. And it’s definitely improves my geekiness factor.

Rest of the day was pretty calm – walk in the park with the family, some reading, playing Civilization IV, which I rediscovered lately thanks to both Civilization Revolution on the iPhone and Steam’s mega-sale (I managed to get Civ IV with all add-ons for less than $15).

Aikido photo is copyrighted and taken from here