The Price of Exercise

 

 

 

“You know that the pool is closed?”  Was the question that greeted me this morning as I waited to get into the centre just before 8 am.  Yes, indeed I did know that the pool was closed and I was about to begin my via dolorosa of gym use for the next three weeks.

     As I went through my selected series of exercises, I was interrupted by a number of acquaintances who questioned my presence, with a smile it must be added.  And they sympathised with me as I explained the extra time that the gym would be closed.  And if anything their smiles grew wider.

     The interesting thing is why I am bothering to go to the gym.  The choice is mine after all.  I can choose to do something else for the next few weeks and not moan about doing something for which I have, to put it mildly, little enthusiasm.

     Why I do it is all down to self-knowledge.  I enjoy swimming.  I like the difference that water gives, it is a different element, and moving through water is not the same a moving through air.  When you have suspect knees then the support that water gives allows you to glide – an experience that is unique to the element.  I am also able to do my exercises that are supposed to strengthen my knees and the muscles that support my new bits!

     There are some that enjoy hard physical exercise and thrive on the pain that comes with pushing oneself to the limits of physical endurance.  I am not one of those people, and I look for an easy life.  Generally.  So, left to my own devices I would probably let exercise slide and do my mental exercises inside the pages of a good book.

     Having an early morning swim, getting up at 5.45 am, takes effort.  If that effort can be integrated into a regime then all the better, habits are difficult to shake off, the trick is doing something enough (if it is an effort) to make it into a habit.

     When I played squash I was a member of a squash league at my local leisure centre, that meant that I ‘had’ to play a certain number of games each month or I would be relegated.  It is the same methodology that keeps me doing a Duolingo exercise each day as I do not want to be relegated from the arbitrary league that the program has placed me in, and which encourages me to participate offering electronic digital inducements to keep myself applied.  We all need those incentives to keep us in line, because so few of us are real self-motivators.

     When I was in Cardiff, I used to swim early morning and after school.  After a day in work, virtually the last thing on my mind was calling into the David Lloyd Centre on my way home for a swim, and I spent the greater part of the journey home debating whether or not I really wanted to go for a swim.  Often that question was answered by the fact that I ‘found’ myself in the David Lloyd car park, while my internal debate was still going on.  Location trumping questioning!

     In a similar way, I go for a swim ‘most days a week’, it is a habit and I wake up at the appropriate time and get ready before I am fully awake!  It is built into the system that is me.  But, I also know that were I to break that system then the whole edifice of exercise will come tumbling down.  So, just because the pool is closed (other pools, and the sea are available) I know that I have to keep up the routine, even if it means going to the gym.

      One problem of gym going, as I found this morning, is that there is a different list of things that you must take to make the experience enjoyable and hygienic.  I forgot to pack another shirt ,and so I had to wear the soiled garment in which I exercised when I went for my cup of tea – luckily outside!

     And I learned my lesson.  Even though I liberally dowsed myself in Citronella, my sweat infused T-shirt attracted more than the usual tribe of blood sucking mozzies as punishment for my lack of preparedness.

   Tomorrow (Day 2 – only 20 to go, sigh!) I Will Be Prepared, and I will take a more potent repellent for fight off the desperation of the latter-part-of-the-summer insect life.

 

Ways to stay sane

NEW LOCKDOWN: Day 7, Thursday

 

Covid, the American election, lack of direct sunlight: when reality becomes too much I retreat to the discrete and the manageable.

     For my last birthday I was sent a stylish Scriveiner rollerball pen, which works just fine.  But that is not the point about the pen, nor its understated elegance.  No, it’s the totally satisfying thunk-click the top makes when it is pressed home, down over the nib.  It has a depth and a solidity and a crisp finality demands that you do it again.  And again.  I do realise that it is the sort of pen that can only be used in isolation: what is satisfaction for one is incitement to murder for another!

 

My new watch has arrived!  I wonder just how many times I have said, or could have said, that.  Having found mechanical watches that fit virtually all of my prerequisites, I have long gone on to smart watches – which of course give a whole new meaning to the search and to the cost.

     To be fair to me, I have never bought a really expensive watch, something like a Tag Heuer or Rolex Oyster Perpetual or whatever, I have been drawn instead to ‘good value’ inexpensive watches.  And sometimes to downright holiday rip-offs.  In the long run, of course, I have possibly (!) spent more than I would have if I had purchased a single heirloom-type conventional timepiece. 

     But I would not have had anything like the fun.  From where I am sitting, I can see two briefcase sized containers that hold (most) of my watch collection.  Each of them brings back memories, sometimes specific places, while others are the triggers to regret, missed opportunities or miss-steps.  It is sad that most if not all of my Cassio Period (early digital) acquisitions are lost, destroyed or discarded.  Though, come to think about it, if all my watch purchases were brought together in one place, I fear that even I would be a little shocked at just how much I had squandered!

      However, to get back to the immediate present, the timepiece that I have on my wrist I bought prompted by a pop-up ad on my mobile phone.  My (extensive) researches into acceptable smart watches have led me to Amazfit.  In my view the battery life, swimability, bikability, and function meet my basic needs.  So, I have bought one or possibly two-ish of them, and generally been fairly pleased – but there is always a niggling doubt about one or another aspect of the device that brings me back to the marketplace to waste (Toni’s word) more of my money.

     The latest version of the Amazfit watch on my wrist is the GTR2 and so I have reverted to the traditional round shape for the watch face instead of the curved strip of the X.  The advantage of the GTR2 is that it does allow you to have a basic always-on face, though this does drain the battery, by just how much time will tell.  And who knows when I will have the opportunity to test it in the pool?  Rather disturbingly, our pool/leisure centre has sent us details of commercially available on-line fitness classes that we can take as part of our subscription – which doesn’t bode well for when they think we will finally be allowed back for our swims in actual water!

     But until then, there is a period where I can luxuriate in the purchase before the novelty wears off and I subject it to a more rigorous utility analysis to see how well it truly performs given my demands.  So far; so good!

 

How much time do you have to spend watching Netflix before it becomes an official medical complaint?  With me, I don’t think it is the amount of time spent in front of the screen that is a problem, rather it is the inability to finish watching what you have started looking at.  I don’t mean that I turn on Netflix and watch relentlessly until I fall into bed, it is rather the fact that I seem to have the temporal toleration of full-strength Coked-up (please note the capital letter) kid with ADT.  My critical systems do a full analysis within the first ten minutes of a film or half the first episode of a series and I’m back to the home screen and searching for something new, or reverting to my default viewing position of an episode of Family Guy or The Big Bang Theory, neither of which seems susceptible to my dismissive critique.  And before you know it a couple of hours have gone by without your noticing.  Or is this just a function of Covid and the consequent lockdown?

     To answer my own questions, I don’t really know, but I am not doing as much writing as I feel I should be doing.  And, I put that down to the fact that my use of my notebook has shrunk to almost nothing because I do not swim.

     As I have mentioned before, my habit is to write something (anything) in my notebook after I have completed by daily swim and while I am having my cup of tea.  Now that swimming is forbidden, at least in the indoor pool that I use, and I have zero intention of throwing myself into the sea, in spite of the fact that my watch will accommodate ‘free swimming’ as easily as pool lengths, do not write anything on the pristine notebook pages.  I do not seem to be able to shift my notebook writing to any other period and adapt to other circumstances.  Odd.

    

I have often wondered about the power of habit. 

     I have realised over time that I have particular ways of packing and setting out my clothes when I change for my swim.  I use a certain number of pegs and I divest myself of clothing in a particular order.  If I change the order then something goes wrong: I forget to take my swimming goggles or I leave something out.  I think it is because there are a whole range of activities for which you do not really think; you are on automatic pilot and as long as things are regular everything works well.  I always us the example of touch typing: the more you think about where the letters are the more mistakes you make, you just have to go with what your fingers know they know and everything will be fine.  This is why, if someone talks to you while you are getting changed, you forget to put your ear plugs in or something.

     When I used to play squash and you were warming up the ball with your opponent before the match, some players would ask, “Which side would you like to start on?” and I made a conscious effort not to care and to be equally at home with left or right just in case I got used to one side more than another to start off and then if that was denied it would have an effect on the game.  If you are used to starting on the right, then it can be unsettling to be made to start on the left.  Gamesmanship is not made up of cheating (though I have known a fair number of shameless cheats in squash) but of little niggles that have a disproportionate claim on your sporting ability.

     As with the warmup in squash so it is in so many trivial aspects of everyday life; from brushing one’s teeth to going around the supermarket for food, there are too many rituals that are so second nature that they don’t register until they are disrupted!

     And lockdown is the perfect opportunity for self-disruption!