Tag exercise

Life — Feb ’20 Monthly Update

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The trek towards healthier living continues, but for good or for ill, I don’t have much to say about it other than to point out the fact that gradual progress is so difficult to see on a day-to-day basis. Sometimes I feel like I’m making no progress at all.

The Monthly Update Topic Order™: blog, writing plans, work, D&D, video games, reading/listening, and other things.

As you can probably tell, twice a week has been tricky for me, but I’m doing it, even if I’m several a couple hours late to most posts. I’m trying to tackle a lot of projects right now, so since my blog isn’t my main focus, I will attempt to allow myself to be more okay with skipping days. Occasionally posting a second time a week is still better than mostly posting only once a week! (Don’t know why I phrased it that way but whatever.)

In the next few months I will be devoting most of my writing focus to the passion project. Things are looking good, even if the stuff we’re making is slow and takes time. I’m still optimistic about a public Patreon going up this year.

Work has been… trying. Alright, but trying. That’s all I’ll say for now, but there’s possible news on the horizon.

D&D has been a blast. My brother has began his journey as a dungeon master and has been doing a great job! It’s pretty obvious to me that I am the weakest encounter builder among the three of us that have DM’d so far (or at least I will be once this brother actually knows what he’s doing), but hey, we all have our strengths. I also have been loving my Monk/Paladin. Rolling 8d20 and scoring critical hits on a 19 means I, theoretically, will crit at least once on more than 50% of my turns. In practice… well, I don’t usually roll above 10. Which is amazing because I roll so many dice on this character. I guess my character is so cool the dice gods decided to punish me.

Nothing to say on video games: I’ve been playing WoW mostly, as will probably always be the case in the foreseeable future. Also playing Heroes of the Storm here and there, and am very excited for the new Animal Crossing game in March.

I have only been listening to Critical Role as far as media goes, and even that I’m starting to fall behind on, but I hope to start a dedicated Dresden Files reread in the near future in preparation for Peace Talks!

And lastly, my resolutions. I’ve been trying to get up early to work out before work. It’s been going well, and I’m trying to eat more alongside that to gain weight. So far, by conservative estimations I’ve gained about 6 pounds, which is good progress! I’m not even a third of the way to my goal, but I’d be pretty shocked if I hit my goal by May anyway, so there’s that. For reference, my strict goal is 150 pounds, but I’d like to hit 165 eventually. I started tracking my weight a couple days into the trek, but my first weighs were about 128.

In other news, I’ve started seeing a therapist, and overall, I think I’m making the strides I need to to make 2020 a good year for me. Hopefully the first of many.

Life — Looking at Your Progress

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It’s so easy to look forward and see how much further you have to go. This is a thing I’m constantly struggling with. I have so much I want to do, and so little time to do it, that all my self imposed deadlines stress me out so much that I do nothing. I know it’s a problem a lot of people have, and for me, it gets to a point where I can never relax.

It’s partly because of this that I feel like I’m getting nowhere. I want to start painting minis (I’ve got dozens ready to go). I have two big editing projects that are on my to-do list (and Lisa Stenton isn’t even on that list anymore). I have three more writing projects waiting (patiently) in line to be started, even if they are small. I want to start looking for new job avenues, even if I already have a potential job offer. I want to start recording audiobooks for side cash. I’m going to start DMing Dungeons and Dragons again on a week-to-week basis. I also want to try to also fit in some more regular video game leisure time with my brother. And on top of all that I’m trying to gain weight, which means eating and exercising more. And that last one is the only one I’ve actually started doing consistently.

I look at all this and make the face that Simba does when he realizes there is a stampede coming right for him. ALL of those things, if I were to do them properly, would take several hours a week out of my schedule. If I’m being generous, I have 50 hours of free time I could put toward those goals. But that means getting up at 5am every day, and if I don’t do that, that number gets cut down to 32 a week. Still sizable, but that’s assuming eating takes no time out of my day and I get 100% of the weekend to myself.

Once these ideal numbers start being broken down to a realistic scale, it gets very daunting. I also have lots of things I want to be doing on Warcraft, and since that has no weight behind it, I find myself being drawn to that the most.

So, it’s easy to feel like I’m treading water, but then I look back just a month ago, when I was regularly fasting for lunch every day just to save money. Since then I’ve started weighing myself every day, eating more than I ever have in my life, and working out (outside of work) at least half an hour almost every day. It’s only been a month so it’s hard to pinpoint direct results, but if nothing else, I feel better about myself for putting in work and effort into a thing.

Maybe I am dealing with moderate amounts of stress every day. But that’s just because I’m putting too much weight on my own shoulders. The sooner I recognize how much I can carry, the sooner I can actually start lifting the weights appropriate for me.

Me — Mt. Wilson Hike

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I have a friend that is really into exercising and hiking. Outside of work, I would say it’s probably the thing he spends the most time on, with basic exercise equipment in his room and whatnot. He’s not obsessed with it—it’s not a thing he just talks about in casual conversation—but it does occupy a lot of his time.

Recently he made a post on social media about getting a group together for his second hike up Mt. Whitney (the highest mountain in California at 14,500 feet), and wanted to see who was interested in joining him on his training hikes.

I don’t really spend a whole lot of free time exercising or even being outdoors these days, so I told him to add me to the list of invites for the hikes. So he did, and I joined him for the first hike: Mt. Wilson.

When I said I’d be interested in hiking with him, I thought I was signing up for a 3-4 hour conversation along some longer trails, but that is not what I got. This was an 8 hour hike with an elevation gain of 4,300 feet.

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The view from the parking lot: not our jeep. Also, the parking lot was already packed at 6am!

I didn’t have a national park pass, so I couldn’t park there, so instead I spent the night at his place and we carpooled over. The thing is, I got there around midnight, slept on his couch, and we got up at around 4:30am. Our hike (with a group of 4 people) began at around 6am. (Yes I started an 8 hour hike on 4 hours of sleep. I took what I could get.)

I was also very leery of joining him because for one, the weather forecast for that day had predicted showers over the entire week, and only the day before did that forecast loosen into noon-time sprinkling. The sky was overcast, threatening to rain at any given moment.

We had a good chat. I learned lots of hiking etiquette from the more experienced hikers (which was everyone), and even though it was early in the morning, the exertion proved to be quite a workout.

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It took us about 4 hours to get to the peak, and we were excited about the prospect of a cafe at the top. We got to the observatory before it opened, and when we did arrive, the people there told us it was closed due to the weather forecast (though it didn’t rain a drop the entire day). It was a bummer, because we had planned on treating ourselves to soda at the top.

This was the first time we really started clearing the trees. We could finally start seeing the world from above!
Difficult to tell where we came from, but those clouds are now below us!
Three hours later and a gorgeous view! Still relatively early in the morning.
Seemed to be a relatively recent landslide on the path as it widened near the top.
Looking out into the valley. Or rather, the clouds overlooking the valley.
I was hoping to see distant skylines, but this was cool too.

 

And so we made our descent, and let me tell you friends, if you thought going up was bad, you have either never gone down for long periods of time, or your knees are better than mine (and let’s be honest, it’s probably the latter if not both). The way down was the more scenic route, with more creeks and waterfalls  alongside (or cutting through) the path. We added a mile to our hike to go to one particular waterfall (which was the main attraction for most of the people that came here). I stopped us on the descent a lot because I saw a lot of good photo opportunities. Also, I was low-key dying a little bit, but had too much pride to call for a real break.

As much as I really didn’t want to add another mile to the hike 6 hours in, I’m glad we went. It lead to a few really cool pictures. There were lots of people there, including a few kids throwing rocks into the water to make big splashes. One of them hit me with a rock instead of the water. It didn’t hurt, but boy did I want to kick his dad in the face for not stepping in and apologizing.

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At the end of the trip was a steep 400ft incline (I’d guess maybe 20-25°), and that last quarter mile-ish killed me. Imagine walking for 8 hours and then the last legs of the journey is a steep slope up asphalt—not even nice, packed in dirt.

I was sore for two days after the trip, but I’m pretty sure that if it wasn’t for that last little bit, I would have been almost completely fine the next day or two.

So that’s it. I’m not a hiker, but this was a fun little thing to do. Some stats: Gained 4,300 feet of elevation over almost exactly 8 hours. Average pace was a 28 minute mile, but our best was 7:50 minutes. We covered 14.7 miles and burned 1,653 calories.