The end of year holiday season lasts much longer in America than it does in Australia - it starts at Halloween and continues unabated until New Years. Between candies in October, turkey dinners in November and the festivities of Christmas still to come, I have come to a horrible realisation – I'm gaining weight in an appalling way.
I hadn't weighed myself since I arrived in America, but I knew that when I arrived I was around 80kg (176 pounds). Well, someone thought it would be a good idea – believe it or not – to have a set of scales at a Thanksgiving dinner (why, God, why?). Weighing in for a laugh, I was shocked to discover that I was weighing in at 190 pounds (86kg), which is as big as I have ever been. Last time, I had the benefit of backpacking around Europe, walking 10-20km a day and living on a diet of bread and sausage for six months to help me get back down to a svelte 70kg (154 pounds). This time, however, I'm going to have to do this the hard way.
Even though I ride my bike all over town, it hardly seems to count as exercise anymore. My body has got so used to riding that I barely get puffed even going up the big hill along Interstate Avenue on the way home. With a gym membership out of our price bracket at the moment (not that gyms have ever really worked for me before!), I decided that I would have to start jogging to get a better all-over workout. Christine got me an iPod Nike+ kit cheap through her store, and I set out for my first run. For my first run, I thought I'd start easy and do a 4-mile loop along a cliff-top road near our house. Boy, was I in for a shock.
I could barely run for three minutes at a time without being completely out of breath and getting a really sore back. Walking at a moderately fast pace was okay, but I'm going to need to do more than that to burn some calories. Fortunately, the Nike+ website that links to the device you put in your shoe has a training program that builds you up from a walk to running over a 12 week period. I've been doing it for just over a week now and I'm already feeling a little more capable, although there's still a way to go! I find that the training program is all the incentive I need to get out and do my half-an-hour a day, although the incredible cold snap (temperatures well below freezing from Tuesday through Friday, with a big chance of snow sticking in Portland itself) that Portland is about to go through may tax my resolve over the next few days! Here's to continued exercise and weight loss... kind of like a New Year's Resolution a few weeks early!
Posted in:
chaosboy,
exercise
on
December 13, 2008
at
at
7:41:00 PM
So it's been almost two months since I started my Nike+ exercise program, and all I can say is that I'm loving it. Each week, I'm getting a little bit faster and running a bit further - my average time taken per mile has gone from 12 and a half minutes to 11. This may seem slow, but my program is slowly building me up to running from walking in a very gentle fashion, probably to stop my body from dying through shock at all this crazy exercise. It's definitely improving my fitness - from barely being able to jog for three minutes without being totally out of breath, I can now run along for 10 minutes without many problems. The best thing is that I definitely look forward to my workouts each day and want to keep doing better every week.