August 4, 2012: Day 3 of 30

As I was laying in bed at about 6:30 on this Saturday morning, I was not excited about getting up and exercising first thing.  I like lazy mornings on the weekend, spent in my pjs, drinking coffee.  I usually balance the checkbooks, pay the bills, update my blog, water my garden, read the comics, and just let myself ease into my day.  Jack and I have different sleep schedules.  I'm a morning person.  During the week I'm usually in bed by 9:15 and wake up at 4:20 so I have plenty of time to exercise and have a leisurely breakfast before work.  On weekends, sleeping in means getting up at 6:30 or 7:00.  Jack, on the other hand, is a night owl and usually stays up until about 11:00 on weekdays and gets up at about 6:20 - 6:30.  So when he sleeps in on weekends, he doesn't get up until about 9:00.  I really enjoy those couple of hours when the house is asleep. I enjoy the quiet and solitude of the morning.  Using up one of those hours exercising is not part of my master plan.  On most weekends, I work my exercise into the middle of the day, but today I knew I couldn't do that.  I was scheduled to meet someone for an hour at 11:00am, and Jack and I had things to do this afternoon, so if I wanted to make sure I exercised today, I knew I needed to do it first thing. 

So, I'm laying there, not very excited about getting up and exercising, and I started to think about riding my bike.  Remember?  Jeremy suggested I substitute one of my runs each week with a bike ride.  As I lay there, with my legs not looking forward to the pounding they get when I run, I started thinking about riding my bike.  I like cycling but I have not been on my bike for a year, not since we got back from our 500 mile bike ride last summer.  I've actually felt guilty about the fact that I haven't ridden for over a year.  My neglected bike was just hanging there, on the wall of the garage, with two completely flat, deflated tires.  Poor Blacky.  I've felt bad for months that my bike was hanging sadly in the garage, covered with dust.

As I thought about riding my bike, I started to get excited about it.  I knew I had lost enough weight that my old cycling jerseys and shorts would fit.  That's nice.  I knew it would feel good to be back in the saddle.  As I lay there, I started wanting to get up so I could ride my bike.

I got out of bed before 7:00, put on one of my cute cycling jerseys from my first AIDS Lifecycle ride, and had a little snack.  Then I aired up Blacky's tires and away we went.  I had no pump or tire irons (I gave them to Carla), I had a crappy helmet (I gave my good one to Carla) that I forgot to put on, I left my cell phone on the kitchen counter charging; but off I went.  And it did feel good.  With the first few pumps of my legs my bike came to life under me and we were off.  I do enjoying cycling.  It is the only exercise I do that I truly enjoy.  It's not a chore, it's more like play.  But today, it was work.  I cannot believe how sore my rear is after just a 15 mile ride.  And my lower back.  Wow, a totally different set muscles got worked today.  And just think, a year ago I rode my bike 500 miles with virtually no pain (aside from a saddle sore - a completely different ouch, believe me!).  I was happy to be on my bike again.  I am looking forward to weekly bike rides and getting a little stronger each week.  I am stunned by how sore I am right now.  Yes, it is a good thing to be riding again.

Here are the details from day 3 of the 30 day plan:

8/4/2012: Day 3 of 30
Weight: 182.0
"Younger Next Year" pages read: 23

Notes from book (quotes or very near quotes are in italics):
It is important to understand that in relatively recent history humankind has undergone a profound shift in the way the world works. We have luxuries and choices in our modern lives that have no parallel in our ancient biology. As Dr. Harry Lodge puts it, "We simply stood up and walked out of nature." Most of us are not likely to face starvation. We are not hunting or hunted. Life is no longer a razor-thin line between famine and plenty. Instead, The great problem of our time is excess, overindulgence, and idleness.

Our minds don't know how to "read" this plenty, and we eat ourselves to death. Our bodies don't know how to "read" the absence of danger, the absence of the need to hunt and gather - the idleness, and we soften to death. We have adopted a lifestyle which is nothing less than disease. We may live longer because of modern medicine, but we live with a lot of pain and many of us die younger than we have to. "Younger Next Year" teaches us how to cure ourselves so that we do not need to live in unnecessary pain and die prematurely. Who wouldn't want to learn how to do that?

Step one of the cure is to stimulate a little of life in the survivalist world. Everything you do physically, everything you eat, everything you think, and feel, every emotion and experience changes your body and your brain in physical ways that were set in stone millions of years ago. Physical exercise and involvement in life trigger great waves of "grow" messages throughout your body and mind. Exercise is the only way to engage your body and your physical brain, but if you do it, you will get younger.  The catch?  You must exercise almost every day.  That leads us to Harry's First Rule - Exercise 6 days a week.

Exercise is magic. It gives you the strength, the optimism, the flexibility to do the rest. It is the amulet you squeeze in your palm to change yourself from the apathetic, crippled and exhausted creature you might otherwise become into something quite different. Someone transformed.

If we want to be younger next year, if we want to live a vibrant, healthy life well into our eighties and nineties, if we want to live large until we die, then we must stop the inevitable decay that comes from inaction.  We must exercise, vigorously, six days a week.  Exercise is the only signal we can send to our bodies that life is good.  When life is good we replace old cells with strong, young, healthy cells.  When life is good our bodies trigger growth - the opposite of decay.  You see, it's easy.  I can choose growth or I can choose decay.  I can choose health or I can choose disease.  It as simple as choosing to exercise or choosing to sit on the couch.  I, and only I, get to decide which one I would rather do...every single day for the rest of my life.

Exercise must be a habit.  It's way too hard to do it consistently if I have to decide all over again, every day, that I am going to exercise.  It must be part of my routine and, therefore; there must be a schedule.  My schedule is to get up every morning between 4:20 and 4:30 and exercise before I do anything else.  That works for me because my mornings are my time.  No one can take my mornings away...no one wants to at 4:20 in the morning.  They are all asleep!  Evenings are much harder for me because so much can happen that can make my evenings slip away from me.  Weekends are different, as I mentioned above, I tend to exercise in the early afternoons on the weekends, so I can have my mornings to myself.  But during the week, I'm like clockwork, getting up every morning to head to the gym or jog through the neighborhood.

And you must do it six times a week.  Chris, Dr. Harry Lodge's co-author, tells us to take the time to get psyched up about this before we start.  Don't ease into it.  That doesn't work.  Think hard about making this monumental change in your life, get yourself psyched up, commit to the program, and then start it with as much fanfare as possible.  Announce it to the world.  Celebrate!  Throw a party!  Make a splash about the fact that you are not only stopping your body's decay in its tracks, but you are reversing that decay and about to embark on a growth spurt.  Be bold and go for it.  You can do this, but first, you have to decide to do it.

I read Younger Next Year for the first time last summer.  I thought I would jump right into the program, but the fact is I spent a long time thinking about it before I finally jumped in, head first, on February 27th, 2012.  But that whole time, between June of 2011 and February of 2012, I was thinking about it.  I knew I needed to do this.  Since the moment I picked up Harry and Chris' book I never thought of not exercising the same way again.  I knew, soon, being idle had to be a thing of the past.  I am so grateful that I was able to finally make that commitment 23 weeks ago!!

Today's calorie count: 1411

Morning exercise: 70 minute bike ride - 15 miles
Evening exercise: 15 minutes at level 7 on the stairmaster - 64 floors
Alcohol consumption: None

Day 3 - Going strong.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad