Back to the gym

I have a train­er now. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to afford a train­er, but this one seems to know his stuff, so after a few weeks meet­ing with him three times a week maybe I’ll knock back to twice or even once a week. We’ll see how it goes.

He instruct­ed me to not do any weightlift­ing in between ses­sions for now. I’m to con­cen­trate only on car­dio and do the resis­tance stuff only under his super­vi­sion. Appar­ent­ly I’ve caused myself some restric­tion of motion from some of the work I’ve been doing by myself, plus some of that and my bad pos­ture may come from an old neck injury. That and all the time I spend at ergonom­i­cal­ly retard­ed workstations.

I’m about 25% fat. That’s down from three years ago. I guess it was April of 2001 when I was first mea­sured and came in at about 28.5%. It took me about five months to drop from 210 lbs to 155, but I don’t know what my per­cent­age was at that time. It’s tak­en me a cou­ple years to creep back up to 195, but I know I felt tremen­dous­ly bet­ter as a small­er person.

I am to do 35 min­utes of car­dio now instead of just 20 – 25. Did 3.8 miles on the tread­mill in 40 min­utes, includ­ing cool-down time. Even inten­tion­al­ly run­ning more slow­ly than I’m used to, my heartrate is up through the roof. I was told to tar­get 145. I reached 145 at the end of my cool-down. Ooops.

The big deal today though was get­ting into the pool. I’m real­ly bad at swim­ming, but I watched a cou­ple oth­er peo­ple do it and tried a slow­er pace, which helped a lot. I swam a bit, then stopped, then swam again, then stopped. By the end, I’d only gone five pool lengths (the pool is 22.5 meters) but I did swim the whole length once with­out stopping.

My prob­lem with swim­ming is breath­ing. If I don’t go real­ly real­ly slow­ly, I start to run out of air, and my body starts pan­ick­ing, and I tense up and there’s no way I can get enough air in. But if I can learn to do it at a pace that gets me 22.5 meters, maybe I can learn to do two lengths, and then more. Baby steps.

I’m wor­ried about the food plan. Seems like a lot of work actu­al­ly. I don’t like to think about my food. Will­ing to give it a try though, and maybe I can sim­ply make progress. Progress is good.

Rejec­tion—Rollins Band