Tag: exercise

A frankly ludicrous suggestion

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It wasn’t the most healthy of weekends, so I really should have done some exercise this morning. But my body was far from willing, and my mind was… also far from willing.

Still, with just three weeks until the start of the new season, and hopeful of a successful return to some footy 4 months after this, I lobbed on some running gear and headed outside. Needs must.

As per usual, a few stretches while my watch looked for satellites to track my run, and then a glance down at my wrist and… wait… my watch was suggesting a suitable training regimen for me.

Well, what it thought was suitable.

Apparently, my watch is supposed to learn from my fitness and workout routines and help me get more from my exercise. It isn’t a fancy pants model – far from it – but it does everything I need it to.
What I don’t need it to do is suggest a suitable training regimen for me, especially when it thinks (having been on my wrist from more than a year, nogal) that 21.0km at 5:45/km would be a good thing for me to do this morning.

Or any morning. WTF?!?!

This workout improves your ability to sustain high intensity efforts for longer.

it told me. (I don’t know why, but I read that in the calm, authoritative and mildly sinister voice of Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey, which freaked me out even more.

That workout would improve my ability to sustain rigor mortis permanently.

I replied.

I ended up doing a (much) shorter, (slightly) slower run than my watch suggested. Just so I could see my family again and watch United at Wembley next month. You know, the basic pleasures in life.

I have switched the “suggest a workout” feature off now. It’s for the best.

Still, run done, and feeling good.
Onward (but not that far onward) and upward (but not that quickly).

Fit by jogging (apparently)

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Glancing through my apps while waiting out a loadshed-interrupted Dodgeball World Cup training session, I found my “Garmin Fitness Age” on my Garmin app. Well, where else would it be?

And what does it mean?
Google is your friend here:

What Does Fitness Age Mean in Garmin Connect?

Available on select Garmin watches, Fitness Age is an estimate of how fit you are compared to your actual age. Compatible Garmin watches will calculate your Fitness Age using your VO2 max estimate.
While your VO2 max estimate describes your current fitness level, it is not always easy to know what it means. Fitness Age reinterprets your VO2 max score in terms of age to make it more relatable.
Regularly engaging in the right types of physical activity will help you boost your VO2 max estimate score and will reduce your Fitness Age.

OK. So run a bit and you’ll get fitter. Wow. Whatever next? Steps?

Anyway:

If your Fitness Age is lower than your actual age, then you are on the right track. If it is higher, there may be some areas you can work on to improve it.

Right. Well, I’m on the right track. In fact, according to my Fitness Age, I’m the same age as I was when I moved to South Africa a whole 18 years ago. Ha!

I must say that I have been working really hard to regain some fitness since you-know-what, and I’m glad that it appears to be paying off, but I certainly don’t feel 18 years younger than I am right now. I might be able to run like that occasionally, but people 18 years younger than me don’t wake up each morning wondering if their knees are going to work that day.

At least, I didn’t when I was that age.

Anyway, now I know what’s going on with my Garmin Fitness Age, I fully plan to drag it all the way back to my late teens, when I was pretty-much unbroken (L5/S1disc excepted). So, look out for me on the road: I’ll be the blur of velocity racing past you (and everyone else), pretending that I’m still 18 years younger than I actually am.

Getting there

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It does finally feel as if I am back to where I was pre-Covid. It’s taken a lot of patience and a lot of hard work – and it will continue to take a lot of hard work – but I do feel like I’ve crossed some sort of threshold.

My last three runs have all been inside 6:00/km, which is really as fast as I’ve ever managed to go anyway, and I’m not very close to dying like I was when I did that back in April. In hindsight, that was a fairly foolish effort, and I’m only half proud of what I achieved.

Run-wise, at least. Staying alive was a quite a coup.

Football is fun again, rather than impossible, and my legs ache because I’m exercising, rather than because they’re full of interleukins.

It’s only taken 15 months.

Home for the footy

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Couple of runs in the crazy wind this morning. One for the stamina, one for the speed. And then a more gentle walk around the village and into the Agulhas National Park.

Can like to feel exercised.

And then back home to Cape Town in time for the second half of the match at the Riverside.

All the fun of the fair. And early to bed this evening.

Day 717 – But weight, there’s less!

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When I got Covid, I lost a lot of weight very quickly. Like 10 or 12kg in a 7 days. And that was because I was literally too weak to eat anything. I was surviving on Lucozade alone (well, and Myprodol, but that probably had limited effects in the weight department).

Once I was through the acute phase, that weight went back on fairly quickly (probably because it came off pretty quickly as well), which is good, because that initial weight was quite a good weight for me to be. However, over the next 6 months, being fully able to eat and drink (more than just Lucozade), but not being able to do any exercise (see 6000 miles… passim.), I gained a lot more weight.
And that was bad, because that was a bad weight for me to be.

So now I have started with some gentle exercise again, I’m happy to report that I’ve finally been losing a bit of mass. And I don’t need to go into details here, but last week, I managed to pass a significant milestone weight on my weight loss journey. And that means that I have lost 7.2kg since the beginning of the year. Again, this weight is coming off fairly easily because it went on easily and it isn’t meant to be there. A bit of gentle temptation and sensible behaviour, and it goes to wherever spare weight is mean to go.

Given the way I have lost weight thus far, I’d imagine that I’ll pop back above the milestone weight – giving the digital display on the scales and extra 50% work to do again – before I stay under it. But that’s fine by me, as long as the general trend remains downwards.

Now come the hard yards, though. I’m not quite back down to my pre-Covid weight (yes, I have put on that much), and I’d like to shed a couple more kilos on top of (underneath?) that as well, so the next bit might go a little more slowly. But I’m confident that it will go.

Would I recommend Covid as a weight loss plan? Well, yes and no. It’s clearly extremely effective, but it does come with some utterly horrific side effects. So overall, probably not.

Would I recommend eating less and exercising more [thanks, TA] as a better method? Certainly.
But all within reason: unless there is some urgent medical issue that requires immediate and drastic weight loss, be gentle on your body and if it needs a beer or to every now and again, give it a beer or two every now and again.

There’s definitely more to life than a target weight.