Category: Health & Fitness

I am, quite literally, sore and stiff from head to toe this morning. My recipe for this wonderful feeling is as follows:

1. Start by moving large quantities of trash and recycling to the landfill Saturday morning. This works those lifting muscles in the back that you don’t use all that much if most of your daily activities consist of typing.
2. Attend a Karate class late morning to early afternoon. This works to exercise different muscle groups than your regular ones used in Aikido. (Note, if you normally practice a hard art, go to a soft art class instead.)
3. Move heavy furniture in the afternoon. This builds on that warm-up you got in the morning with the trash.
4. Drive a friend/family member’s vehicle to the dump. This is particularly useful if the vehicle is significantly different from what you normally drive (e.g. a van as opposed to a Subaru). This works different muscles to maintain posture or stretches you in somewhat different positions.
5. Sleep.
6. Sunday afternoon, hop on your mountain bike. Go straight up for 2.5 miles of class 4 road. Pause momentarily at the top, then plunge straight down something that Jeeps would hesitate to tackle because the mud, rocks, trenches, and logs across the road give them pause. Do not pause.
7. Arrive at family’s house and eat 2-3 times more in one meal than you have been in an average day. Feel the stomach muscles stretch in response!
8. Finally, wake up on Monday morning and regret everything that led up to this “wonderful” feeling.

I started the Medifast Diet one year ago. While I’m up a few pounds today (169#), I’ve managed to stay within 5 pounds of my goal weight of 165# for since October. I also decided that it’s safe for me to stop counting my calories every day, but I will continue to track my weight to make sure I don’t sway too far off track.

Today I took a bike ride with a friend on my lunch break. We stuck mainly to a class 2 and class 3 road, although we did a little off-roading on a newly-cut driveway (still very fresh). It was great to get out on my bike on my lunch break, something I haven’t done in years.
While we were returning, on the steepest part of our uphill climb, I heard a loud noise to our left. I looked and saw not one, but three bear cubs between 30-40 feet from us. They were running on what appeared to be an intercept course, so I yelled for us to stop. Fortunately, said bears were running toward the nearest pine trees, which they scaled with amazing speed! Once I realized they were cubs, and they weren’t a threat, we moved as fast as we could to get out of there, just in case mama bear was around. Given that thought, the rest of the hill went down pretty quickly!
This is not the first time I’ve encountered bears while biking, but they were definitely a lot closer to civilization this time. It makes me a bit scared, as I don’t like thinking that they need to be coming this close to humans for food. Hopefully they were just kids getting into trouble without mama’s permission.

Okay, this push-ups thing is getting on my nerves. Last night, prior to Aikido, I tried, and failed, to do a single push up. Apparently I was still really sore from push ups on Saturday and weapons class that morning, so I decided to do them again today.
I restarted week 4, and could barely finish day 1. I never claimed to be brilliant, but somewhere, I think, there’s a problem with the “progress” I’m making.

Darnitall! I was unable, again, to get through day two. I failed out on the fourth set of 25. ARGH. I am sick of starting over! One possible reason is that I had sword class this morning, which may have drained some of my upper body strength.
On the sit-ups front, week 3, day1 went much more smoothly, and I banged them out with relative ease, which is to say, barely.