jimsjournal
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jimsjournal |
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After a stretch of cold weather, we had a couple days of almost spring-like weather -- the high temperatures on Tuesday and Wednesday were in the upper forties (around eight or nine C) and it was really pleasant to step outside. In fact, I went for a nice run on Wednesday. Well, sort of nice... I mean, I enjoyed the run but I was getting pretty tired. I've just not been running. I think this was the third time I ran this year -- ran outside, that is -- I have done a few very short runs on our treadmill. One Sunday in late January -- after watching part of an indoor track competition on television (it came on following the Australian Open which Nancy, of course, had been watching) -- I was inspired to dash outside and run a mile around the neighborhood. Being almost spring means that the comfortable outdoor running season is almost here -- the time of year when you are not in danger of either frostbite or heat stroke. And that means all of the April and May races (again, no frostbite and no heat stroke). So this past Sunday I went out and ran two miles (and then came back in to put in some miles on my exercise bike and do my usual leg lifts and rows and work with hand weights). I felt the strain of that run in my legs the next day -- and the day after as well. Working on the exercise bike may help with aerobic conditioning, but it does not work the same leg muscles in the same way that running does. So yesterday I ran for three and a half miles and my legs today are not nearly as sore as they had been on Monday. I said I "ran" for three and a half miles but really I was just jogging. Only some geezer in his mid-sixties would think of that pace as being running. Oh, wait, I am going to be sixty-four in a couple of months. Oh well. (*sigh*) I was doing a bit of reorganizing some boxes of stuff in the basement the other day and I came upon some old running logs. I allowed myself to become diverted from my task by spending some nostalgic time looking through them.... and then I had a bit of a shock when I began looking at my log for 1990. My weight. Oh my goodness. My weight in January 1990 was 180 pounds. My memory was that I weighed somewhere in the mid-190 pound range and then would work to drop ten pounds by summer. And as I flipped the pages I found that by August of that year my weight was fluctuating between 172 and 174. That's thirty pounds less than I weight now. Cough. I said that's thirty pounds less than I weigh now. Okay... I'm at 204. Yeah, I know, last summer -- at the time my doctor put me on Toprol XL for my blood pressure -- I said it would be a good idea to drop twenty pounds by the end of the year. Guess what... I didn't. In fact, somewhere around Christmas I put on a couple pounds. (Okay, four or five.) I'm going to blame some of my problems on that sore throat - head cold - cough thing that kept coming back and hitting me again and again in the late fall and kept knocking me off my workout schedule. What? Yes, you're right, it didn't seem to stop me from eating. The past three or four weeks I've been very good at getting in full workouts. Typically I've combined eight to twelve miles on the exercise bike with lifting hand weights (usually alternating a pair of ten pound and a pair of fifteen pound dumbbells) and with leg lifts and rowing exercises... generally totalling fifty to seventy minutes. Tomorrow I'm going to turn in entry forms for the March Hare Hop -- a three mile race in Mystic, Connecticut -- that comes up in just one week from Sunday, not much time to get ready for it, but I'm not expecting to actually run it as much as just jog it with Jill and have a good time. And right about now I'm going to post this entry and go downstairs and get my workout done before Nancy gets back from her tennis match. (This is winter break week for Rhode Island schools so Nancy has the week off -- and I'm taking today and tomorrow off as vacation days.) Oh... well, no, I don't really have a good excuse for not posting an entry for two weeks. Partly I was very busy with work and partly it was due to me concentrating on being sure I got in a full workout almost every day and partly it was due to a lot of work I've been putting in on another Web site. You've probably read entries where I've talked about the Kinney Bungalow (for example 09/13/04, and 07/22/05) and now I'm building them a Web site. One of the purposes of the site is to serve as a photo album so people (i.e., prospective brides who are looking for a place to hold their wedding reception) could see what the place looks like when set up for a wedding reception or large anniversary party, etc. (You could see it here -- but remember that it is still under construction and parts of it are still more proof-of-concept than finished pages.)
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