Long today! But good long. Very detailed.

I did NOT feel like doin’ it up this morning. No particular reason (except maybe 10 days of being good in a row). I just felt like I’d rather first, stay in bed, and second, sit down and have a read rather than do the exercise things.

I stayed on the path, however.

Since I’m a bit of a drama llama, I’ve taken to calling this whole deal “The Path” for the last 36 hours, which amuses my wife no end and makes it sound like I’ve joined a cult. With about 10 seconds of effort I’m sure I could discover that it’s a terrible name and associated with some horrible religious movement or new age fooferaw, but I’m kind of fond of it now, so I’m not going to look.

Here it is; what’s been working for me (despite being logey about it this morning) so far in 2019:

* Get up and get clothes for day * Go downstairs and feed the cats, pack my lunch, and chug about 500 ml of water * Back up to exercise; 10 minutes AT LEAST but usually 25-30 of a few (very few for now!) pushups and situps, then rowing or spinning * Shower, shave, brush teeth * Jerkpod! * Other computer stuff: correspondence, site maintenance for the canoe club if needed, music for the next WAFFLES!, etc. * Downstairs for coffee, clean the litterboxes, finish getting ready for the day * Log food for the whole day* Leave for work (M-F)* Have a normal day. Eat only what I’ve packed and planned for in the morning. * Come home from work, have dinner (as planned in the morning). Have a normal evening. Then the checklist:

Then on with the rest of my evening, or off to bed, as time allows.

It’s… I guess it’s pretty regimented, as these things go. But the key thing is it’s working for me and as long as I don’t deviate, there’s no reason it should stop working. It’s a total time of 90 minutes in the morning (most of which are things I need to do anyway, I’m just strict about the order) and 30-40 minutes in the evening; far fewer things I HAVE to do there, but all things that add value to my life.

So yes. The Path. It’s silly to have a name for it, but I like things like that; I’m dramatic.

I’ve been clean-shaven since January 4 or so, which is the longest I’ve been clean-shaven since… 1996, or something. I’ve been a facial hair guy for as long as I can recall. I’ve face-shaved periodically after taking my beard off in the past, but never shaved for more than one day.

But I bought some fancy shavin’ cream on stupid post-Boxing-Day special and thought “well, why not shave for a while?” I can tell you why:

* I only have an old-fashioned razor that takes old-fashioned blades;* My face has weird contours, including an abnormally deep valley between my chin and lower lip, but my face is also pretty… squat?… so it’s almost like a mail slot; * I seem to nick and bleed in a sharp breeze, let alone when I’m whacking at my face with the sharpest thing mankind has ever invented.

So it’s been going okay, I guess, but right now I look like I’ve been making out with a Cenobite. The good news is I’m now certain that I don’t faint at the sight of my own blood. Or a litre of my own blood. Coming from my face.

There are solutions, of course — get a razor with eighteen blades, for instance — but I don’t want to spend more money on shaving.

And why am I doing it?

It feels vaguely more honest to be trying to get in shape with a naked face. Especially when you have cherub cheeks and a bit of a double chin — I had a beard even at my fittest, but now it feels a bit like I’m using it to hide things.

Will I stick to it? I think I’m going to take a day to let my face heal — I just did some quick searching on how often to change blades — and see. I don’t hate the ritual. I’m not super fond of my face. I don’t like looking like I lost a fight with a lawnmower. I don’t know.

Added a couple of charts to the 2019 Tracker, so hopefully those trend lines will help inspire me in moments of despair.

Spinning! It’s HARD! I knew that already from previous spinning — I even went to a drop-in class once, and my wife was an avid spin studio member for about a year. We bought a high-end-of-the-low-end bike for Christmas 2017.

It’s been a while since I’ve spun, and holy DIVER. I set myself up for 20 minutes of mixed speed and resistance, and those shuttle jump-up-and-down things. At Minute 12, I had to stop because I was legitimately getting a bit worried about a heart attack.

And, I mean, that’s cool — something every day, and that was certainly something. But a good lesson that I can’t just leap back into things I was once good at (or reasonable at) like it ain’t no thang. I’m’a have to add a minute to every session til I’m back up to 20, then 30.

I’m more of a rowing guy anyway…

I just went through 2018 looking for my longest streak. 20 uninterrupted days of logging. Only 20! That surprised me, as well as how absolutely terrible the back half of the year was for logging and fitness in general. I chalk it up to some work issues, which were resolved before the end of 2018, and I now have a streak to break: 20 days. Three weeks! One already down. No sweat.

The last few days, I think I’m through the easy weight — whenever I get back on track, there’s kind of a four-or-five pound drop that happens almost immediately. I don’t know if it’s just water weight that I’m carrying due to eating garbage that happens to be salty, or if it’s mind over matter, or if focusing on my health makes me poop more — whatever it is, there’s a quick rush of “easy weight” that always makes me, well, overconfident.

I ran out of easy weight a couple of days ago — I think I’m into the grinding work of this now, which is fine. Everything is fine.

Art by the legendary KC Green, from Gunshow. Buy his stuff!

It does get harder from here, though. I think — again — this is almost a job for Sober Brain, where I need to take the same determination I apply to not drinking and just turn its unblinking eye on following the program every day come hell or high water.

It’s a good program; it works. Even if I didn’t know I was doing it, I spent two years developing it through trial and error (and error, and error).

It’s not yet a week into the new year so I’m not about to throw myself a parade yet, but it’s been a pretty good week.

Weight is down modestly (and safely), I’m now using the body fat scale to track body fat (which I haven’t done in five years of owning this body fat scale — I read some early “ehh, it’s inaccurate things and thought ‘bah’. More recently, I’ve come around to “even if it’s inaccurate it’s probably consistently inaccurate, and I’m in lousy enough shape that those readings will probably be positive over time”).

The news is NOT GOOD! But it will be getting better with time.

My headline today is I set myself an ambitious 30-minute row, sat down, and after the first two minutes was all “you know, I only promised myself at least 10 minutes a day of exercise — I can nope out of this after 10 minutes.”

But then I did the “think like a 175-lb. man” exercise. What would that version of me do? What will that version of me be like? 

That guy’ll do 30 minutes on the rower happily.

So I did.

And after a while it felt pretty good. Exercise without music — part of the whole “flow to the door” thing is I try not to use the phone except for logging my weight until after this is done — is hard. It’s harder than I thought it would be. I think I may need to add an “attention span” component to this project. But I did it, and I’m glad I did.

It’s a goal, but not entirely attainable – among other things, I just spent a few minutes trying to figure out how to set up auto-replies to texts on my iPhone. It can’t be done!

The challenge is (a) to go tech-free, because I loves me my devices, and (b) to figure out how to navigate the social burden of just not getting back to people. Which I guess is pretty easy — I’ll just get back to people tomorrow.

I’m’a get up from the desk and leave my phone in my office, and try to keep from touching it for as long as possible. There may be something I need, technologically — we’re making some things today, so there may be some stuff that needs to get looked up — but I’m going to attempt to power through sans electronics as much as possible once this is uploaded.

Day Two of Cat Bonkers — I slept in the guest room with the second cat last night, as we felt bad that he has to be locked away until the cats re-familiarize themselves with each other. Pets!

My wife was up at 4:30 thanks to First Cat deciding that in my absence she was a suitable target; she was, obviously, because she got up at 4:30 and decided to share that joy with me. Fed the cats with her around 5, and packed a lunch.

But it’s the weekend! I’m eating at home! Why pack a lunch?

Because I think it might help.

It’s not something I’m committing to on the regular, but I’m really enjoying salads for lunch, and I am trying my very best to adhere to the “plan it in the morning and stick to that plan”… er, plan. The best way to do that, I figure, is to actually pack my mid-day food and whip up supper before I leave for the radio show, and thereby know my food for the whole day before my day really begins.

So I guess I’d better get cooking!

Today was a good test of the “10 minute rule” for exercise — one of our cats somehow got her sanity reset at 3 a.m. and decided the other cat was Enemy Cat; they were on the bed at the time, so this involved my wife getting her face scratched and a rolling battle over two floors of our house as the older cat tried to straight up MURDER the younger one.

It’s settled down a bit now, and no permanent damage to my wife’s face, but we were up from 3-4. I used that time to pre-pack lunch, but then back to bed and up late — this is exactly the kind of day where 2018 me would have said “no time to exercise”.

2019 me says “there’s always a little time to exercise.” So a quick round of pushups/situps and just 10 minutes on the spin bike. Is it a workout? No. But it’s a tetch of exercise every day, which is the important thing. Gets the blood going.

I have time for 10 minutes a day (15 with faff on either side) to exercise. I must. Most days I’ll do more, but I’m determined to not do less.

I made a little box for my nightly checklists; I don’t have Checklist v2.0 to share on this computer, but it’s pretty much the same as Checklist 1.2 but with space for a one-sentence journal entry, a “gratitude/meditation” space, and a dedicated space to doodle something.

Is it useful? Is it helpful? Well, not super much so, but it’s substantial, and I think the physical act of taking a blank piece of paper out of it, writing on it, and putting it back on the “done” side is a ritual that feels good. It feels like I’m doing something.

“Productive” is out of the phone app race immediately — if you don’t set up 100% of your desired habits when you set up the first time, the “add a new habit” feature just drops the “buy now!” screen in front of you and if you clear it, it goes back to the main menu. My wife is trying HabitBull, and I’m taking a look at Momentum (Apple only, sorry).

To be honest, though, I’m not sure these things are for me. The checklist at night feels like plenty, and the “Flow to the Door” system seems like the optimal way for me to get my days started.

Oh — and I’m already altering the “flow to the door” thing. The cats have to get fed when I get up or it’s just not tenable. So now it’s not a perfect flow — up, clothes, then all the way down to feed cats / pack lunch, then back upstairs for exercise and flow resumes. The perfect is the enemy of the good!

A good start to 2019 yesterday; a natural outgrowth of trying a new “best of” morning routine is the return of the old “flow to the door” idea. Basically, “no backtracking” is the philosophy there. It’s pretty simple, but very powerful when I do it right.

The one downside is that the cats get fed downstairs, on the “last station,” so I’m expecting more kitty riots in my near future. And I might be leaving for work stupid early some days, to do personal things from the office to avoid the downstairs-upstairs-downstairs of a traditional morning.

So far, the cats are doing well, and I’m pretty jazzed about the new/restored routine. I feel like there are going to be mornings where a little bouncing around is inevitable, but if I make more use of my iPad and keyboard, and/or bring my work laptop home so I can do things from the kitchen, maybe not. Is going up and down stairs a bit deal? Not at all. But it’s a little psychological thing that does seem to help me feel like my life’s in order.