So today was the 2nd day in a row I ran around Discovery Park, which is my usual loop.  I took a few days off after Ragnar, as would any sane person *cough*, but got out for a fast run yesterday and again for a moderate run in slight heat this afternoon.

I think it may be becoming a habit, a good one, a chance to pause, reflect, and collect my thoughts, which have been all over the place, like a box of superballs dropped on an Escher staircase.  I need it, frankly.  The release.  The quiet.  The chance to ask myself the Big Questions, like:

• What do I want my life to look like?
• What’s important to me?
• How do I best deal with all the crap that occasionally gets thrown at me?"
• How do I deal with disappointment?
• How do I take full psychological advantage of the many good things that are happening to me, around me, because of me?

Weighty questions all.  Running is providing an outlet to organize those things, perhaps subliminally at first, but hopefully more and more front-of-mind as I get used to the process.

In the meantime, tomorrow is yet another day and you never know what’s around the next corner.  Keep your eyes and heart open and you may be surprised.

xoxo

So I get to the gym tonight at 6:49, just in time to hear over the intercom: “Mieko’s will be closing in 10 minutes.  Thank you.”  WHAT?  I thought they stayed open until 8 PM on Saturdays.  My bad.  You’ve never seen a guy working out faster than me between 6:50 and 7:00 PM.  I did 9 total sets, very intense, but with good form,and actually felt like I got my money’s worth.

The good thing is I learned that I can work out faster and more intensely in my quote-unquote normal workouts.  This can only mean good things for my fitness.

Having said that, next time I’ll get there at 6:30

Last night I went to the gym and abused myself.  It may have been the most intense weight workout I’ve done in 15 years.  I really pummeled myself – endless intense sets with heavy weights, no rest, pushing myself to the max.

I worked out a lot of stress, anger, rage, disappointment, and frustration.  A good workout just grabs all of that out of you and throws it on the floor, for you to grind into the carpet with a 200-lb barbell across your shoulders.

Good news: I benched my bodyweight for 6 reps – a new (recent) PR for me, and worked my abs so hard that I’m really *really* sore (in a good way) this morning.  Sometimes abs are tough to target, but I was a  maniac last night.

Today?  Running after work.  I have a race in mind in a few weeks, another 5K, so I need to start the intervals.  The race is called the Valentines Day Dash and is held at Greenlake the morning of February 13th.  It’s nice to have a goal coming up to focus my training.  I want to hit 25:00 for this one.  I WILL hit 25:00 for this one.

• Have been working out hard so far this New Year, and I’m pleasantly sore from both yesterday’s stair-running workout as well as the chest workout from the day before.   Sometimes I find it hard to get a good chest workout in – my shoulders are strong enough that they tend to take over – but today I’m feeling that classic second-day DOMS that tells me I did well on Monday night.  More importantly, I’ve been eating well and sparingly and my weight is coming down again.  I’m pretty lucky that  when I put my mind to it, I can drop fat pretty quickly.  I was going to say easily, but it’s never easy and takes a lot of willpower.  But if I can muster up the willpower, I can do it.
• Speaking of willpower, I made a different commitment to myself on Sunday that – w00t w00t! – I’ve still kept.  How about 3 days in a row? (waits for applause)  It’s really a commitment to life, to karma, to fate, to the way things are (apparently) supposed to be in my little world – but it takes willpower on my part to keep it.  The urge to backslide remains strong, but I figure that my life – and the lives of those close to me – will be best served in the long run by me accomplishing this goal.  And it will get easier over time, as with most things in life that you set your mind on.
• Thomas Aquinas says “The things that we love tell us what we are.”  What does that make me?
• I’m going to have a pretty busy next couple weeks – work/career and personal issues are approaching perfect storm status.  Maybe I’ll get by on four hours of sleep.  Maybe I’ll invent a super-productivity ointment.  Maybe I’ll discover that my fears about getting overwhelmed are all for naught.  Regardless, I’m looking ahead with some anxiety.  Send me some good vibes, because I need them.
• I didn’t know you could get the rug pulled out from under you at the same time as getting bopped on the head.  Well, it can happen.  Trust me.
• Thomas Aquinas also says, “The highest manifestation of life consists in this: that a being governs its own actions. A thing which is always subject to the direction of another is somewhat of a dead thing.”  That quote resonates with me for a couple different reasons.
• I have to get over this feeling that a situation that I thought was cast in stone is still fluid.  #getoveritanthony.  Mostly wishful thinking, I suppose.
• I was pleased as punch yesterday to work together with my team to give public recognition to a coworker who REALLY deserved kudos for the continually great job they do.  I don’t think we give enough recognition to deserving people.
• Only a slight segue – being kind is its own reward.  Words I try to live by.  Not everyone agrees that I AM kind, but I try my best.
• I’m going to the SEOmoz event tonight at the Elysian Brewery in Seattle – are you going?  It should be fun. I can only stay an hour, because indoor soccer practice starts tonight at Arena Sports SODO at 6:30, and I’m REALLY looking forward to getting back into playing soccer.  But for an hour I can network, catch up with friends, meet new people, and try to have a great time.
• I’m guessing that most of us don’t really appreciate how much can happen in a single hour, so my goal (tonight and for the new year) is to appreciate every minute I have.  Minutes are precious.  I want to spend my minutes happy, with people I care about and whose company I enjoy, and work on things that give me enjoyment.
• One last thought: your entire life can change in a single minute.  Imagine something you’ve been wanting, and then imagine what might happen, that would take less than 60 seconds, that would make that thing come true.  It happens.  Not always, but it can happen.  Will fate/destiny/karma/God work help you to change your life in the direction you want it to go?  More importantly, will you work on what you can to effect that change?
• OK, very last thought: I have great friends.  I’m very lucky.

*novel concluded for today*

So the full results are in for Sunday’s Jingle Bell Run, and I finished in the top third of my age group, coming in 70th out of 240 in the male 30-39 division.  I’m very pleased with that placing.  I felt worse than I actually performed; my hamstrings were sore and tight before and during the run, and in fact all day yesterday.  Today is a different story; I feel great and am not at all sore.  In fact, I was able to get to the gym this afternoon for a fairly intense weight workout.

All this focus on fitness and exercise is just a net good thing.  There’s nothing bad about it.  I’m feeling great physically, and although my diet has lapsed a bit in the days since my 100-day workout challenge, I know that it’s a temporary thing and that I can take the next step in my personal fitness goals whenever I decide to set my mind on it.

I’ll leave you with two words: adventure racing.

Lots of confusion out there over the exact meaning of the adjective “black” in the phrase “Black Friday” – some take it to mean dark, angry, depressing, as in the supposed mood of thousands of foul-tempered shoppers, fighting over the last Oakland Raiders XL fleece jacket at the Crenshaw Wal-Mart.  In  actuality it means “profitable”, as in the phrase “in the black”, so it’s intended to carry good connotations.

Yet another example of language that can suggest different things to different people, which I need to keep in mind for Crowdify.  I may have to write a blog post about this on my Crowdify blog, which would mean I would need to get that blog working again after many months of disuse.  Which would mean I’d need to dust off my Perl/MYSQL skills (shakes fist at WordPress).  Which would mean I’d need to find the motivation…endless backwards branching from the leaf, to the twig, to the branch, to the trunk, to the root, to the earth itself.  Is nothing easy anymore?

Tomorrow I race in my first 5K in many years.  To prepare, I slept 11 hours.  Well, let’s just say that was the excuse.   I had briefly considered going to the gym this morning for a light workout but, hm, felt disinclined to do so for a variety of reasons.  Instead I stayed in bed a while longer and let my mind race over everything I have coming up, which is a lot – and yet also a just a little, when you tilt your head and look at it in just the right way.  Which way to perceive it?  That, my friends, is the endless struggle.  How to look at our lives and decide how to interpret circumstances.

I’ve been reading Martin Heidegger recently, and on the one hand it’s nice to get lost in philosophy, but on the other hand he’s a real bear, syntactically speaking.  The book is “Poetry, Language, Thought” (he disdains the and that one might reasonably put in the title) and it has some gems about truth and beauty and origin and connectedness, so I’ll keep reading.  I may pick up an old book I have called “The Enlightenment Reader” next, which I first read years ago, but which is probably due for a re-read.

What else?  Saw a request put out for volunteers to do a stair-climb challenge next week and offered up my name.  That sounds fun, and I can climb stairs better than anyone else my size I know so we’ll see.  It may be too late – the team may be full – and it looks like I may not know until Monday, what with all the people taking the day off today.

A few weeks ago I successfully completed an exercise program in which I worked out every day for one hundred days.  Here are some things I learned that I hope  can help you if you are considering setting your own fitness goals.

1. Don’t give yourself an out.  Just tell yourself you’re going to exercise every day, and then do it.  It’s not that hard a principle to grasp.  The problem is if you let in a seed of doubt, it can quickly sprout into a tree of excuse.  Don’t just make it a priority – make it an unbreakable contract with yourself.
2. Diet is just as important as exercise.  Your diet is your fuel.  If you put turds in your gas tank, expect to feel shitty.  Eating only high-quality foods in moderate portions will let you lose weight, feel energized, and prepare your body for the rigor of an every-day exercise program.  Eating smaller amounts more often will be good for your body.  Along the way, you’ll learn what hunger – light hunger, not starvation – will feel like.  In time, you’ll come to recognize this feeling as a good thing.  You’ll eat when you need to, not when the clock tells you to.
3. Stretching is overrated.  I don’t think I stretched at all during the one hundred days, and didn’t feel like I missed anything.  I did some dynamic strength moves that stretched muscles gently and repetitively, and I think that this is all you need.  I’ve read studies that correlate strenuous before-exercise stretching programs with injury, and I would tend to agree.
4. Vary your exercises.  Why?  Two reasons: to maintain your interest and enthusiasm, and to prevent staleness/burnout/injury.  Both are important.  Try every machine in the gym.  Take a class.  Run.  Bike.  Swim.  Love the diversity.
5. Don’t go heavy.  By this I mean don’t try to max out your intensity – in either reps or volume – more than once or twice during your hundred days.  It’s more important to be consistent and light than run the risk of burnout by going heavy too often.  Personally, I’ve made the mistake of going too heavy too fast and got burned out more times than I can remember.  Start slow, be reasonable, and I guarantee after 100 days you’ll feel more fit than you have in years.
6. You can do it on your own.  You don’t need a trainer, a workout buddy, or even a supportive spouse or significant other.  YOU have the power in you to do it all on your own.  Acknowledge this power.  When you achieve your goal, you’ll feel independent, strong, and able to take on a lot of other challenges that you are facing.
7. Prefer to work out early in the morning.  Three reasons: you’ll feel energized throughout the day, you’ll avoid having to make a tough exercise-vs.-rest decision at the end of the day when you may be tired, and you won’t be taking away family/friend time.  The downside, obviously, is that if you’re not a morning person you’ll have to adjust.  Try it.  I think you’ll find it’s worth it.
8. Stairs are God’s gift to the fitness freak.  They simultaneously train your endurance, your stamina, your cardiovascular system, and your muscles.  They have built-in goals on each rep.  They are easy on the joints.  I credit endless staircase-climbing to a lot of my gains in fitness.
9. Don’t step on the scale.  Too many people are obsessed with the scale.  Since you will be building muscle as well as losing fat the scale can be misleading, especially day-to-day.  Better to check your body in the mirror, check the fit of your clothes, and listen to the admiring comments of friends, coworkers, and family.
10. Appreciate and cherish your body.  Once you start exercising regularly, you’ll get in touch with the physical self you may have forgotten about.  All sorts of physical sensations will be yours to rediscover.  We are physical beings and feel so much better when we are friends with our bodies, instead of treating our bodies as waste dumps or forgotten toys.  Your libido will increase.  Your stamina while doing everyday tasks will increase.  Your ability to ward off sickness will increase.  I’d put in a comment about bowels here but this is a family journal (ha ha!).  Bottom line: love your body.  It’s the only one you have.

Have you completed a lengthy exercise program?  What else would you add to this list?

I did it!

One hundred days in a row, exercising every day.  Originally my goal was thirty, then sixty, then one hundred…and I did it.  I know that “pride goeth before the fall”, but I feel extremely proud of myself right now.  I’ve had a turbulent few months, but being able to commit to, and deliver on, this exercise goal has been a real positive experience for me.

I avoided serious injury.  I avoided illness (except for a couple days of memorable stomach trouble, which didn’t keep me from exercising).  I avoided feeling sorry for myself and bagging it when I was tired, or stressed, or just feeling blah.  I went.  Every day.

I’m riding the crest of a wave of personal enthusiasm in that I feel like there’s not a lot I CAN’T do right now, if I put my mind to it and really commit to the goal. Besides the weight loss, the gains in fitness, and the health benefits, that’s a major benefit to making it to the end of a challenge like this.  I’m encouraged.  The sky is the limit, no matter what’s going on around me.

Am I TOO pleased?  Nah.  Your opportunities to be really unabashedly happy with yourself are few and far between, so you have to take your joy where you can.  Right now I’m joyful.  I’m going to ride it a while.

I’ll fill you in on my next goal – I’m not sure what form it will take, but it will be forthcoming before too long.  I’ve demonstrated once and for all to my satisfaction that I work best with clear goals in mind.  Maybe we all do.

Thanks to each and every one of you who has lent your support and encouragement over the last 12+ weeks.  I owe you each a big debt of gratitude.

More to come…Hope your day is going as well as mine has!

I had a great day today.  Let me repeat that – I had a great day today.  It feels good to write that.  Did I win the lottery?  No.  The day started off wonderfully, and an accumulation of small things afterward kept the momentum going.

Let me begin by relating what I did last night.  I decided to follow up last week’s fun movie experience seeing Whip It with a trip to the Majestic Bay to see the new Coen brothers film, A Serious Man.  As Theodor Geisel might have stated, I did not like it – I did not like it one bit.  It was maybe my least-favorite Coen Brothers film ever (edging out Barton Fink, or maybe The Man Who Wasn’t There).  The storyline revolved around a professor whose life is falling apart around him, and he can’t find any answers to right the ship.  He’s trapped by his own passivity. He gets pushed around by his wife, her lover, his kids, his neighbor, random bill collectors, the rabbis that he goes to for assistance – it’s a real downer.  There are a few moments of Coen brothers signature levity-in-the-midst-of-ruin, but they appear like leaves in a fall windstorm – unsurprising, dry, quickly blown away in the maelstrom.

Earlier in the evening I visited a friend who owns and runs a pizza place and caught up for a few minutes.  If you’re in Ballard and looking for a good pie, try Soprano’s Pizza & Pasta.  It was hopping in there last night, which is always a good sign – it means other people are feeling positive about the place.  It’s got a busy, bustling atmosphere.  The Meat Lover’s pizza was chock full of … meaty goodness.  Yum!

Then this morning arrived. I was up early and able to catch up over coffee with a dear friend who I hadn’t seen in a while.   Good company and good conversation make the time really fly.  It really set the tone for the rest of the day.

Then to an auto shop in Kirkland to get some minor work done on the Land Rover.  Then a drive through the hardest rain of the season so far, back to Seattle to watch the kids play soccer.  Mercifully, we only saw intermittent rain during the game and not the pouring deluge that drowned the Eastside earlier in the morning.  Will scored three goals, all long breakaways, and Audrey, being the nice girl that she is, kicked one into our own goal to give the opposing team some hope.  One can only scream “Other way, Audrey!” so loud/so often.

Then what?  Wow, a nap for a couple hours.  Nice.  The kids woke me up, and we all bundled up and went to the hardware store to pick up some supplies, then on to Serendipity for a quick dinner.  Then back home, where I did some handyman-type work (tiling, electrical, various jobs that required epoxy) for a couple hours.  Meanwhile, the kids piled every pillow in the house under one of their raised beds and jumped off again and again.

Then, Day 90 of my exercise program.  Since Janet’s been out all day with a girlfriend, I wasn’t able to go to the gym or head out by myself for a run or anything, but I did a home workout with the medicine ball and really hit the abs hard.  I’m liking what I’m seeing so much that I took some more “after” pictures with my iPhone with the abdominal setting on the camera set to “rippling”. (lol). Can I just say again how much I love how I feel physically, both when I work out as well as during the rest of the day?  I wore a shirt today that had never before fit me.  None of my jeans fit.  I feel energetic, athletic, strong, powerful, confident, enduring, and relaxed.  Well, for the most part I feel relaxed – it’s not all wine and roses right now.  Heck, it’s not even Snapple and dandelions most of the time.  But when I exercise, everything gets better.

Now the kids are calming down, watching Samurai Jack – an excellent cartoon series.  Did you know it’s won four Emmy Awards?  Me?  I’m dinking around on the internet, cleaning up e-mail,doing a little scheming and planning and chin-in-hand scenario analysis and hoping against hope that I’ll have more days like today.  What will tomorrow hold?  Dunno, but for now it doesn’t matter.  Today was good, and I’m milking the feeling.

Sheesh, look at me, I’ve written another novel.  Massive apologies, but if you’ve read this far you probably like me enough that apologies aren’t necessary. Hope you are doing well.

What’s been going on?  First of all, what I really want to write about I can’t (or, more precisely, won’t) write about.  That’s stuff for my journal.  With that caveat out of the way…

I recently had reason to pass in a username/password combination to an MSi file for an unattended auto-install of a Windows Service.  I’d been following this CodeProject post on how to pass in additional parameters to an MSI, and things were going along swimmingly….almost.  It turns out that the parameter names I had chosen – “UserName” and “Password” – were reserved, and the “UserName” parameter was being replaced under the covers by my full name “Anthony Stevens” instead of the string parameter I’d been passing along on the command line.  Of course there was no warning, no error; the thing just didn’t work.  Lesson learned: logging can be your friend.  I have to get better at log4net so I can introduce a new log4net configuration in my sleep.

My CSS work is just about complete.  I got to include a smallish bit of JavaScript/jQuery work in the project as well.  Next steps look like they may include a broader architectural review, maybe including updates to the SDLC processes, which is really my bread and butter.  This organization wouldn’t fare so well on things like The Joel Test, so there is an opportunity to make significant progress right away.

Today and tomorrow I’ll be working on some architectural diagrams for a large-ish system that I’ve been collaborating on with a partner.  It’s a long-term investment of time and effort, but who knows which things will pay off.  On a philosophical level, sometimes you spend a lot of time doing things that seem like they’ll *never* bear fruit – but if you enjoy the time spent, you never know what can happen.  I believe that good things happen to good people.  I believe in optimism.  I believe in hope.  I believe that “no” can turn into “maybe” can turn into “yes”.

Exercise has been going well.  Last week’s proto-cold has disappeared, and although I’m not going back to two-a-days, I’ve been going every morning.  Yesterday I ran 4 1/2 miles on the treadmill, and this morning I lifted weights, to put day 88 behind me.  I also did something strange (for me) – I introduced myself to, and chatted with, someone that I’d seen at the gym regularly the last couple months.  Normally when I’m at the gym I’m very focused, intense, an in-and-out kind of guy.  But I figured I should get to know these people that I see every day so I had a nice short conversation before I left for the day.

I’m still losing weight, steadily – I’m down 57 pounds from my all-time high.  None of my pants – and this is not an exaggeration – fit me.  All of my belts are too long.  I’m also getting less and less shocked at seeing ab muscles in the mirror.  I feel physically great.  My sleep the last week or so has been ragged, but that’s a symptom of something else, not the exercise.

Wishing you the best possible day, whoever you are.