Back to business

(Just as long as that business doesn’t require a reliable electricity supply.)

Part 1.
The first pub quiz in ages last night. And we won. Some things never change. Our team name did – we went with “Chinese Cabbage” for obvious reasons. It stood us in good stead, with a comprehensive victory assured well ahead of the final round. Well played, team.

Part 2.
I managed to get back (no pun intended) to gym today for the first time in about a month. Time will tell whether this was a good decision, my back being at that difficult “probably ok, unless you manage to do something really innocuous to damage it again” stage.

Notes from my really gentle session:
– Gym is quiet, but can you imagine what it’ll be like in a month’s time?
– That wasn’t as easy as I remember. It’s amazing how quickly your fitness drops off when you have been injured.
– I’m (briefly, at least) re-motivated to get back to full fitness as soon as possible, but…
– Tomorrow may well bring a world of pain.

Part 3.
I’ve secured a bit more advertising stuff for the blog. You’ll likely see a post or two in the next week or so that simply doesn’t make sense in the context of this otherwise wonderfully-written site. They’ll probably be about casinos and sports betting. I’m not supposed to say that they are paid content, but they are paid content – clearly identifiable by the “Black Label Fund” category I have applied to them. However, this time around, it’s more likely that any monies earned will go towards a Christmas bone-us for the beagle than any beer. (See what I did there?)
Thank you for your understanding.

SSDS

Same Sh*t, Different Saturday.

Stayed up too late watching footy. Maybe a brandy. Maybe two.

Wake late after remarkable dreams of Winston Churchill doing a speech before we all had to hide from an impending air raid. I have no idea either. Wander downstairs. Coffee. Check in with the neighbourhood whatsapp group on the break-ins last night. Four. Great. Breakfast. Paint the laundry. As you do. Just the bit behind the beer fridge and the washing machine. No-one sees it anyway. Revise maths and history with the boy. uMkhonto weSizwe. Lilliesleaf. The Rivonia Trial. Pythagoras. And the train that leaves Edinburgh for London at a certain time and a certain speed. You know the rest. No replacement bus service. Remarkable. Get stung by a bee. Bastard. Gym. Because when your 13 year old wants to do something not involving a screen, you jump at the opportunity. Miles and miles on the static bike. Not quite Edinburgh to London, but still. Heart rate up to 183. Another hour of lifting, stretching, sprinting, sweating, dying. Home now and legs a bit hurty if I’m completely honest. I’m usually always completely honest. Considering motivating for UberEats tonight. We deserve it.

Might stay up too late watching footy. Maybe a brandy. Maybe two.

Gym idea

I am known for my great ideas. You only have to look here to see one of my great ideas, which has now been taken up by real people and was mentioned on a famous podcast by media mogul Kathan Pillay.

That one took 2½ years to catch on.

So Virgin Active probably need to get in touch pronto because I’ve had another great idea after my experience at their Claremont branch this morning.

And the great idea is this: chairs.

See, when I got to the weights machine section at gym this morning, there were a few stations taken, and a few free. Nothing unusual there, and also nothing unusual in one of the stations (it was the Vertical Traction one, for the record) being occupied by a middle-aged lady who was talking to her middle-aged friend. No big deal, conversations happen, but then this particular discussion just seemed to go on and on.

And on.

In fact, by the time I worked out (no pun intended) that it was dragging on a bit, I began to wonder if it was ever going to end. I began to watch while I worked.

Long story short, I had managed over 270 (two hundred and seventy) reps on various machines in the 20-odd minutes it took them to finish their chat. I say various machines, but obviously, I couldn’t use the one that Little Miss Chatalot was on, could I?

They did no reps at all, but you should have seen the form on their TMJ muscles. Incredible.

And then to add insult to injury*, once she’d chatted for flipping ages, she did 5 quick pulls (careful now – this isn’t Stellenbosch) and then headed off, finally leaving the station open for me and everyone else who had paid to use it for… like… “gym stuff”.

So how would my chair idea work then?

Well, if a couple of Newlands housewives (in this case, or actually anyone else who just wanted to talk and not do exercise) needed to chat, they could just sit on some chairs next to the machines and talk there. I’ve been doing some rudimentary calculations and that would – I think – free up the gym equipment for people to use… as gym equipment.

It’s fairly radical, I know. But then so was the iceberg idea, and everyone thinks that’s great now.

Hey Virgin Active, my email address is here. Let’s see how this near outlandish, but ultimately rewarding, chair idea can be implemented soonest, shall we?

 

* there were no actual insults or injuries, although I was quite tempted.

10,000 steps folly

I have now knocked up 10,000 steps (or more – often more) each day for the last 45 days, according to my Garmin watch. Given that some days, I’ve done far more than 10,000 steps, I reckon I’ve managed somewhere around half a million steps in the last 6½ weeks. And that’s on top of gym visits and cycling and other things that don’t get recorded as steps.

And now it’s become a bit of a thing to keep it going, and that’s why (very occasionally) you’ll find me walking around the garden at 9pm just to knock off the last 500. Yes, I get health insurance points for it. No, they’re not really worth much. But yes, I do see it as something of a personal challenge and yes, I know that 10,000 steps (or so) is not going to be enough to keep this middle-age weight down.

That’s what (for me, at least) this guy fails to get. He doesn’t like the 10,000 step thing at all:

“There’s no scientific validation. It’s very hard to do it every day, and there’s no mention of intensity, or difficulty level, or heart rate, or breathing, or anything that determines whether exercise is valuable to you from a cardiovascular perspective.”

He quotes someone as saying.
Well, it’s not hard at all – as proven by my last 45 days.

If you are a top athlete (or even if you’re not), doing 10,000 steps (or anywhere thereabouts, because sure, this isn’t an exact science) is not going to make you into a world beater. That’s where the extras – the gym and the cycling – come in. You’ll need conditioning, coaching, a decent diet and perhaps even some mental training to achieve your lofty goals.

The thing is that it isn’t about that though. If you’re a top athlete but you need a watch to tell you that you haven’t done much exercise today, then actually, I’d wager that you’re not actually a top athlete at all.

But for the average Joe (or Joanne) on the street, a reasonably price watch which helpfully tells the time, and can give them some idea of how active they’ve been that day, is a godsend. Because then they can see that at 5pm they’ve been lounging around in front of a computer screen for too long that afternoon. And they can choose to do something about it.

Sure, Discovery (aforementioned medical insurance) uses 5,000 and 10,000 as their goto numbers, but then I can get as many points as I do for 10,000 steps each day simply by scanning my card at the gym. I don’t even have to look at a cardio machine, let alone do anything on one. They don’t value those 10,000 steps too highly.

It doesn’t even have to be 10,000 steps. Simply because “there’s no scientific validation”, that 10,000 really is completely arbitrary. Do what you want with the numbers: it’s there just as a guide, an aide-memoire.
But surely if it helps you to be more active than your mate who doesn’t subscribe to the 10,000 steps mantra, then it’s a good thing. It’s certainly not doing me any harm, anyway.

That said, blogging is a very sedentary endeavour, and thus I must get myself moving. These steps aren’t going to walk themselves, you know.

Updweight

That title was supposed to be a combination of ‘update’ and ‘weight’. I’m not sure it worked. Sorry about that.

We’re back in Cape Town and back with the bathroom scales that I have used to record my mass over recent times. There’s no point (in my humble scientific opinion) of using different sets of scales to weigh oneself, since unless they are regularly serviced and calibrated, bathroom scales are notoriously unreliable and will only (eventually) upset you. So sure, it’s not perfect to be using the ones upstairs Chez 6000, but at least the error in my weight is hopefully somewhat consistent.

I’m delaying the inevitable here though. The upshot is that I seem to have gained 1.7kg over the festive period. To be honest, it seems to me (if you’ll pardon the pun) that I’ve got away lightly. There was an awful lot of beer, chocolate, fish and chips and brandy all happily put away. And then there was everything after breakfast too. All for 1.8kg. Add to that the fact that – although I have kept up some modicum of activity with my steps (10000 or more each day since I was sick in November) – I haven’t been near a gym for at least a couple of weeks.

Oops. Looks like we need to make that 3 weeks.

Look, there’s still time to go before the finishing line, what with the kids off school for another 6 days, sushi tonight (that’s last night if you’re reading this today) and at least two days of extreme laziness coming up in (or near) Robertson in the intervening period. But considering what has gone before over the last month or so, I’ll very readily settle for sitting about 2kg heavier (by my bathroom scales) than before all this madness started.

Give me a fortnight to get back to where I was and then we go again. (He said, over-confidently.)