Wii have lift off.

Fiona's sister was the happy recipient of a Nintendo Wii for her 24th birthday last week, and the two of them have been going crazy over it in the time since. Being an addict of racing games and racing games only, I've struggled to find it within me to even look at the Wii. I know it's a somewhat revolutionary concept - and I think that's great - but without the sheer power of the PlayStation 3 or the Xbox 360, I couldn't see how I'm really going to get any great kick out of whatever racing games the Wii may offer up. Consequently, I didn't bother to try it out.

Hot damn, that was a mistake. I tried it this morning, and it's a hoot. That's right, a hoot. The Wii Sports package that comes with the system is simply phenomenal. It has its drawbacks (the movement sensors aren't as accurate as they could be, which can be very frustrating), but all said, it's just great.

For actual fun, Golf has been great, as has Baseball (though it seems all I'm good at is striking out, or hitting foul balls). I'm yet to try Bowling, though I imagine that'll be sweet. Tennis was a bit of a letdown, but I'll give it another try soon.

The real winner though? Boxing. Damn, what a workout. Maybe I'm just a lot more unfit than I thought (a very, very strong possibility), but I was working up a sweat in no time. I found myself getting very frustrated at the sensor's inability to follow my movements properly - often throwing the wrong arm on the screen, or not responding to my punching movements at all - but that was quickly forgotten whenever I managed to land a series of punches in a row, leaving me excited and pumped for more. If anything, the lack of accurate responses from the sensor
merely served to force me to punch twice as often to land all the hits that I needed to land, which in the end resulted in an even heavier workout.

I guess shadow boxing - which is all this essentially is - is no substitute for a punching bag (or a person, if you're actually into competitive boxing), but it definitely classes as a good cardiac workout in my opinion.

If only there was something that would make use of my legs, I could cut back on the actual jogging!

Alright, maybe not. The Wii is no replacement for genuine exercise, but it's definitely a productive way to enjoy yourself and get a good workout all at the same time.

Edit: I've just discovered there's a Fitness Mode. Now we're talking.

Oh the noodles!

Well, it seems I've gotten the running back under control - going at least once a day - but I'm struggling with the diet. I mean... I'm not eating McDonald's, I'm not eating candy, I'm not drinking soda, and I'm not eating chips (known to Americans perhaps as "crisps"). However, I do eat a hell of a lot of instant noodles. And that stuff's bound to be bad, right? Especially if you have say two servings of it each day.

So, you know. It's great that I'm out running regularly, but unless I can get a handle on my eating, I'm not sure just how much of a benefit running is actually going to be. My general fitness and tolerance for running will no doubt improve, but probably not as well as it should.

I need a professional trainer I think!

The Awesome Lunch

How awesome was your lunch yesterday? Mine was this awesome.

I'm trying to find some cool gadgets to make running a little more exciting, like perhaps a GPS watch or a backpack with a water reservoir inside, et cetera. Any suggestions? Ha ha ha, what am I saying, I'm the only one that reads this!

The "Couch to 5km" Method.

Man, this is harder than I thought it would be. The "Couch to 5km" article over at CoolRunning.com describes the Week 1 routine as follows: "Brisk five-minute warmup walk. Then alternate 60 seconds of jogging and 90 seconds of walking for a total of 20 minutes." Sounds simple enough, right? Well yeah, it does. I agree.

So why was it so damn hard!

I think that the hardest part for me was waiting for the timer to get to 0 seconds. I used my phone as a timer, with a countdown from 60 to 0, and simply clutched it in my hand as I jogged. When it vibrated, I'd know I could stop running and start walking for 60/90 seconds. The problem was that because I was letting my phone do the counting, and not myself, I was so desperately anticipating the 0-second mark that I'd find myself almost yelling in frustration: "Come on, it has to have been 60 seconds by now!!".

After the first 3 reps of this, I ended up stopping each time at an average of 50 seconds elapsed. For some reason I just couldn't manage the final 10 seconds. On the last one, I made it to 55 seconds elapsed. Wow! Haha. Note the sarcasm.

As Fi pointed out when I sent her an email at work full of my sob story; "Tomorrow is another day, and you'll know what's ahead of you this time". She's a clever girly that one.

So, tomorrow's another day!

I don't want to jinx myself, but...

I may be back. Back in the running, so to speak. After a month or two of rest (this is also known as "I sat around doing nothing, eating very very poorly, and watching the first two seasons of Entourage") to allow my knee to heal, I'm back on track. Well, I'm not sure if I can declare such a thing after only two days, but damn it, it's my blog!

On Friday, I took Buster out for a tentative run to see if there was still much pain in my knee. It's been feeling pretty good lately—I still can't walk up or down stairs comfortably, but it's not as bad as it used to be. So anyway, we went for a run (remembering that when I say "run", I mean "fairly slow jog"), and it felt pretty good. There were a few moments where I could feel a light pain in my knee, which would result in an "oh daaaag" thought to visit my head, but it soon passed.

This morning—Monday—Fiona and I went for a jog up at our usual stomp (a local football field), and while she pushed through three full laps, I managed about 2 laps, based on my own special aggregate recipe. In other words: I ran out of breath a lot and had to walk, haha.

But the point is that my knee now feels okay! I am hoping it'll stay that way, and barring any unforeseen atrocities upon my personage, it should be good. So now I'm back to my only problem being general fitness and health, and not bodily!

Good days are upon us.

Damn knee!

My knee is really starting to piss me off. Just to recap, I came off my motorbike last november, and one of the injuries sustained was to my knee. Nothing horribly bad, but there's some pain when walking up and down stairs and so forth. The weird thing is, I've been jogging since the 8th of January. Every week day, with only a few exceptions. The only gap I've had of more than 1 day was a few weeks ago when I took a business trip interstate and stupidly left my running shoes there. It took two weeks to get them back.

Somehow, in that time, my knee has decided to become an absolute monster. I now have my running shoes back, but I can't jog without getting a shocking pain somewhere in my knee. It feels like it's around the cartilage or patella, but I'm no physio. All I know is that it hurts. I can walk absolutely fine, not even a hint of pain, but if I try to jog or walk up/down a flight of stairs, I get the pain.

I should visit a physio, but frankly I just can't afford it right now. I literally can't. Not because I don't want the cost of a physio interrupting my social life or shopping agenda, I just simply cannot afford it.

Most of the advice I've been getting from friends and peers has been "walk a lot, see if it helps your leg recover". I don't really have the time during the day, so I might have to make it a night thing, try to get some long distances in. Maybe walk to my mum's place (and then get Fiona to pick me up, haha).

Perhaps I should try to get in a few nights of swimming each week? Or maybe I should borrow/lease an exercise bike to get the cardio without the impact? I dunno.

I don't think anyone reads this - I haven't exactly been spreading the URL around - but if anyone has some tips, I'd appreciate it!

Link: 10 Tips for Runners

A great list of tips here, titled "Ten Tips for Completing a Marathon".

Check it out!

WalkIt.com

Wow, this WalkIt service looks pretty neat. It's not available in Australia yet - or anywhere outside of London, it seems - but hopefully it'll cover Aussie cities in the future.

"Still in beta, Walkit.com website is a mapping site designed for perambulating pedestrians keen to do their bit to fight global warming.

Currently covering a large chunk of London, the site helps walkers plot cross-town journeys in a similar fashion to London Transport’s Journey Planner.

Users simply type in the postcode or street name of their start and end points and a zoomable street map (based on Streetmap.com) is generated, with the walking route clearly marked in blue.

If the user hasn’t been specific enough with their addresses, the interface offers up a list of more precise locations, including road intersections."

Read more about it here.

Temptation Part 4

We went to the movies tonight. TMNT, or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles if you prefer. Man oh man is it hard to walk into a cinema, and actually get past the concession stand without buying anything. I'd say my resistance rate is probably something like 50/50 these days, but unfortunately, tonight fell on the "submission" side of the balance. I had a choctop ice-cream. Boysenberry. And boooy was it good.

What did I have for dinner, before going to the movies? A peanut butter sandwich. 474kj (about 123 calories, give or take) per tablespoon. How many tablespoons did I have? Probably about 3 or 4. Not the best dinner! We haven't done the food shopping in over a week - our car has cost us a lot in repairs over the past week - and we're running out of anything healthy. Not sure if that's much justification for going overboard on the peanut butter allotment, though.

Starting all over.

I was interstate for a week on work, a few weeks ago, and a complete brainfart at 5am in the morning lead to me leaving my bloody luggage there. I literally got all the way to the airport, onto the plane, and back into Melbourne before I'd realised I was minus all my luggage. I am a pillock.

Anyway, two weeks of stuffing around after that, and I manage to get it back. Couriers being idiots, the people over there taking almost a week to get me the info I needed before I could arrange shipping, and so forth.

Why do I bring this up? Because my running shoes were in my luggage. If I'd known it was going to take two weeks to get them back, I'd've just bought some new ones! Oh well.

Did I continue to eat properly in the intervening two weeks? Honestly, no. I didn't exactly eat horribly - steered clear of McDonald's and its ilk - but I probably had the odd Coke here and there, and I made the wrong dinner/lunch choices a few times.

The point is, I didn't do any exercise in that time. I could have gone swimming, I could have done situps and pushups and all the rest, but I didn't. Bloody unacceptable.

So anyway, I've got my shoes back. Have I been jogging in the week since I got them back? Once. My motorbike accident last November left me with a pretty sore knee, and it's been flaring up lately. I really can't figure out why, though. I was jogging in January, and in February, and in early March, and it was mostly fine. So why is it causing me a problem now? I went jogging the other day - that "once" that I mentioned - and I get a sharp pain in my knee whenever my left leg hits the ground. I'm quite worried, but right now I can't afford a visit to a physio.

Really not sure what to do.

More on Hydration.

I discovered this morning that going for a run without drinking much water the day before feels like absolute horror! Because tap water here in Adelaide is disgusting (I live in Melbourne, but I'm in Adelaide for a week on a work project), I've been drinking from boxed water from the supermarket. It's perfectly fine, but in limited supply since I only bought one box, haha. So I probably only drank about a litre of water yesterday, which is 2 less than usual.

This morning's jog was horrible! I even felt dizzy at one point. I've got a headache right now, but it's eased up a bit now that I've had a swim and a nice cold shower and about 4 glasses of water in the past 20 minutes.

Urgh. Failure!

I pulled out of today. It was because of a) how hot it was today (something like 36c), and b) the fact that I had no way to stay hydrated. I could have carried a bottle of water, but that would have gotten annoying. I tried my backpack, but it was too heavy and bounced around a lot without a waist strap, so that was no good either. I'm going to be in Adelaide next weekend so that's out too, but the following week I'm going to buy a CamelBak water backpack and see how that goes. They're pretty well priced, so that's good.

The Extra Long Hard Road

Tomorrow, I plan to do the following route. Without my dog! This will be a combination walk/jog, but I'll be aiming to jog further than I walk, and try to keep each walk distance shorter than the jog distance. Of course, The most I've ever done with that method was 6km a couple of weeks ago, so it remains to be seen if I can do it for 17km!

The Long Hard Road

Man, been a while since I've updated this blog!

So today - and on Monday just passed - I took my good mate Buster out with me for a jog. Poor little blighter can't last as long as me! I tell ya, dogs just ain't they used to be! Consequently I've literally cut my jogs short both times just to make sure my dog didn't pass out haha.

By the way these two jogs were on top of the jogs that Fi and I do each morning during the week.

I wanted to turn down Sesame Street (haha, I know!) from Blackburn Rd and continue back up to Lawrence Rd, but I was pretty sure Buster wouldn't like that. On the bright side, while I may not have ended up doing it, I'm glad that I felt like doing it and wasn't desperate to get home and sit down!

Measurements 002

The first four weeks are over, and the measurements are in!

Waist - 114cm (Down 4cm if the first time was right)
Hip - 107cm (what?! Must have got it wrong the first time)
Arm - 37cm (Down 2cm if the first time was right)
Chest - 118cm (Down 2cm, woo! Hope the first time wasn't wrong!)
Thigh - 66cm (Down 1cm if the first time was right)
Neck - 44cm (no change)

For people like me...

There's not much to it, you only need to know a few things. Although if someone more knowledgeable wants to correct me, feel free!

1) Limit yourself to around 1500 calories a day, 2000 if you don't mind stretching it a little bit.

2) All the nutritional information is on the side of pretty much every food packet possible. It's mostly in Kj (in Metric countries, anyway), but you just divide the number by 4 to get the number of calories. So something with 400kj is roughly 100 calories, etc.

3) Keep track of it all, like I did above. Cereal has 1 cup per serving, and 1 cup is X amount of calories. Milk has X amount of calories per serve. The combined amount is your calorie count for that meal. Easy!

4) exercise! Half an hour's worth of jogging will - as far as I know, and I'm happy to "run" with it - burns about 300-400 calories.

Temptation part 3

Resisting temptation is a lot easier when you make sure you only stock the pantry with healthy stuff. Even if I wound up binge-eating, I'd only have apples and carrots and rice cakes to choose from! We've only got one car, so it's not like I can jump in the car and drive to the supermarket for a tub of ice-cream, because Fi's usually got the car at work (I work from home, so she takes the car during the day).

That said, we live next door to a 7-Eleven and the only thing I've bought since we started eating well was a Calippo and a Billabong ice-cream as a little treat. Compared to the rubbish I was buying there in the months leading up to Christmas, I'm doing pretty good on the self-control front!

A sample

Today's eating...

Brekky: Big bowl of Nutri-Grain and Skinny Milk (About 400-500 calories)

Nutri-Grain's about 100 calories per cup, and I probably have 3 cups in my bowl.

Skinny Milk is surprisingly calorific! About 100 calories per 250ml. I have about 400ml in my bowl, maybe a bit less.

Lunch: Two toasted sandwiches. Wholewheat bread, two slices of tomato on each sandwich, 1 slice of light cheese on each, and - my guilty pleasure that I need to cut down on - a bit of light mayonnaise. (About 400-550 calories all up)

Wholewheat bread is about 300 calories for 4 slices.

Light cheese is about 100 calories for two slices, maybe a bit less.

The 4 slices of tomato would be lucky to be more than 25 calories.

The mayonnaise is 60 calories for 2 sandwiches, roughly. 100 calories at most.

--------

So! Right now, by lunchtime, I'm about 1000 calories under what I could technically be eating, and I feel fine. Not hungry in the slightest. This means I can snack a little bit here and there later in the day, and a light dinner to top it off (could have more, but it being night, I wouldn't want to consume energy that would be going to waste).

Sweet!

Temptation and Support

It helps that Fi is always around. I had a burger at Hungry Jack's after a friend's birthday last week, and I felt pretty bad about it! I mean, I'm entitled to a burger here and there, but still.

So yeah, if Fi hadn't been there at my folks, I might have had that slice of birthday cake. It's not something I'd be regretting though, because like I said; the way I'm eating right now, I'm damn well entitled to the odd bit of junk here and there! That said, it felt great to knock it back and not mind at all, heh.

Resisting Temptation

We visited my folks today, and it's the day after my sister's birthday so there was plenty of cake in the fridge. I could have had a slice if I wanted - in line with my decision to not be too hardcore about the diet side of things - but I didn't. Didn't feel the urge, really. It's a small thing, but it's important, ya know? To acknowledge that yeah, cake is delicious, but I'm pretty happy without it.

Same with soda. I haven't had any soda for 2 weeks now, and it's been easy! Admittedly I have cordial too often at the moment, but I'm not sure yet if that's such a bad thing. I drink a shedload of water every day, so I reckon the odd cordial here and there each day should be okay.

I wanted "Got The Runs?", but oh well.

So, looks like I've started a fitness blog. That little animated jackass of a paperclip in MS Word even popped up and asked me if I'd like help writing it. Okay, I made that last bit up. I'm hoping this blog will help to further inspire me - and maybe anyone else who happens to stumble across it - to stick to my fitness and health regimen. There's nothing hardcore about it; I'm simply jogging a few laps of our local football ground every morning with my girlfriend, and cutting as much junk food and drinks out of my diet. That means results will come slower than a hardcore diet and fitness regimen, but it's a good permanent lifestyle change and it should mean that everything will fall into place on its own.

I'll post a more in-depth entry very soon!

Day 1

Well, I guess this is Day 1!

Yesterday - well, last night - I went and did our food shopping. I spent about a hundred bucks (Aussie dollars), and bought as healthy as I could while also maintaining enough variety to stop me getting bored with the selection and wandering over to the local 7-11 (which, painfully, is right next door).

• Two types of lettuce (cos and iceberg),
  
• 2 types of salad dressing (balsamic vinegar and light french),
  
• tomatoes,
  
• capsicum,
  
• apples,
• Vita-Brit crispbread
• 3 packets of light rice cakes
• Vegemite, yay! I love this stuff
• stuffed olives - stoked to discover these are very low in Kj hahah.
• wholewheat bread, which I luckily love. Quite high in Kj though, I had no idea!
• 1 box of tropical fruit and oat cereal
• 1 box of apple and oat cereal

Can't remember what else, but basically it's all pretty good. I mean, a few things there aren't perfect, but I think it's important to not be too hardcore about it. I think that'd be too hard to maintain, so I'm trying to include some things that - while still pretty healthy - also add a bit of the greedy pleasure to the diet without being too hardcore.

So, today!

Today we had some Nutri-Grain for breakfast, with light milk (well, soy milk for Fiona, she's lactose intolerant), and a couple of hours later we went for a jog at a local grass-based athletics track. We want to do it every morning, before work, and I think we can do it. We'll have to manage our sleep better - I have a tendency to sit up drawing or chatting online until around 12am-1am. That's gonna have to stop!

We walked one brisk lap around the track, and then broke into a slow-medium and even jog. We did this for half a lap, and then walked briskly for another half. We continued this for only another 4 or 5 laps, which I guess shows that we've got a long way to go! In my defence, I did have a motorbike accident a couple of months ago that caused some bad rib bruising on my back, and some muscle soreness in my left knee which is still present, but - thankfully - slowly fading. It didn't bother me too much during the jogging though, so that's great.

And that's pretty much all we did! I want to expand on it a little, with some pushups and situps and squats and so forth, but we might give it a month before we start including that. I know we'd probably be better off doing it now, but hey... little steps!

Some stats:

Van: My current weight is about 102-105kg I believe, but I'll have to confirm. I'm 5'10"

MEASUREMENTS!

Mike:

waist - 118cm
hips - 105cm
chest - 120cm
arm - 39cm
thigh - 67cm
neck - 44cm