I am supposed to be sleeping quite a long time ago, but I don’t want to “break the chain”, so I’ll finish this post now and will try to make it short.

I am pretty serious about getting myself into a much better shape, so I’m incorporating more sport and fitness into my life. Yesterday was a ‘jogging’ day. It’s very well known phenomenon, but the most difficult part is to get out of the house in your running shoes. Everything else is pretty automatic – you just start running. Good thing is that technology provides some extra fun and some extra motivation – I already mentioned yesterday a FitBit, but for running I’m also using iMapMyRun service through their iPhone app – iMapMyRun. It uses GPS to track your location and plot it on top of the Google Maps. In addition to that it overlays a voice information about your total time, distance and speed. This is particularly handy to me, since I’m doing some sort of interval training by mixing running and walking and I can listen to my iPod, while the voice tells me every minute my current stats. So far I’m running for 2 minutes then resting 1 minute and then repeat it all over. Here’s my yesterday’s route:

Continue reading →

 

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.

Continue reading →

 

Jan-1-2010

New Year resolutions seem to be a silly thing, but I think whatever moves you forward is good, right? I had a goal of having a journal or diary for quite a while. Heck! My whiteboard in the home office says “Log Often” as one of my few commandments, but while I started it couple of times but was never able to turn it into a habit. Hopefully this will be one of things that stick, at least I have some sort of hunch about it right now. I am not sure yet if I’m going to make them public or not, as well as am I going to translate it to Russian for my LiveJournal blog. Time will tell. So far I’m gravitating towards doing it as English only to minimize efforts, since most likely I will treat this translation stuff as a boring chore rather than a fun activity.
Now few words on why I think logging is important. First of all I read about usefulness of logging (I’m such an easily influenced person) in a few books from authors I highly respect. For example, Steve Pavlina writes about journaling all the time. Now coincidentally at least two of my LiveJournal friends started their own daily or almost daily journal and I have to admit that I found their writings quite interesting and inspirational even if they are writing about pretty trivial things. And I know that as soon as I start writing it’s almost like opening the gates and tons of thoughts are flooding my brain and it really helps me to review what I am doing, am I doing it right and so on and so forth. Well, enough on meta-stuff – long story short, I’m going to do it for a while and I am sure that it will help me some way.

Continue reading →