It has been a wonderful and freakishly warm day off today. Warm enough to allow me to open up all the windows for the afternoon, and let the fresher outside air decontaminate the place of several months of accumulated stagnant indoor particulates. It's rare to have temperatures climb above 0°C around this time of the year around these parts. It has sparked me with happy thoughts and music to play in my head of places that are fun and warm. After seeing some of the exploits posted on Facebook of a friend who is enjoying her visit out of the country, in L.A., I can't get the song California Sun out of my head. Because she is a bit of a wilder sort of spirit for her years, and because one of her nicknames is Dee Dee, the hard-driving punk rock cover of that song by the Ramones has been looping itself in my mind repeatedly, not that sappier original 60's doo-wop pop version by the Rivieras. High energy music, combined with the warmer weather, has been the carrot for motivating me to use some of the day off to haul my ass back into the gym after this several month long hiatus. The stick part of the motivation equation was some news of a relative, several years younger than me, who was recently hospitalized for some severe cardiac problems. It was a significant enough prompt to tell myself to use this day as a stepping stone, and declare it as one to improve myself physically beyond this current state of recovery. I vowed to not allow myself to risk becoming that buggered up, or to become softer and weaker any further with my cardio-pulmonary health.
I realized that a trip to any fitness facility now was going to be a sobering slap upside the head: facing up to the facts of just how far I've deteriorated in physical conditioning over the past while. My regular mindset of the priming 007 attitude wasn't working well enough for me then when I went in and out those doors of the Field House today. All that happened was that I was reminded how much of a change I went through. In the context of 007, I went from being the parkour-running-terrorist-chaser, Neptune-rising-from-the-waves, beach-nymph-shagging, balls-of-solid-rock, able-to-recover-from-being-poisoned-in-minutes specimen of James Bond in Casino Royale, to being the bedraggled, plummeting-off-a-train-bridge, uranium-bullet-riddled, burnt-out, can't-shoot-worth-a-shit, washed-up, booze-sponging bastard version of James Bond in the beginning of Skyfall . . . except maybe three times worse than that.
My objectives for today were simply to check over and compare what I could do before having the embolisms, and what I can do now in terms of cardio and strength exercises. I didn't even bother to time myself when I did the track work. The target was just to be on that track for 15 minutes, moving as briskly as my body would allow me to: by running, walking, crawling, or slithering along by my lips if I had to. It was by far the most disappointing comparison in how much I declined. I did a slow jog for the first two laps before I became too winded, and then after that I alternated between one lap doing some quick walking, and the next slow jogging each time around. I managed to last the whole fifteen minutes. What I must note and be thankful for is that even though it felt tough, at no time through the exertion did my vision start to blur and tunnel; nor did I start seeing any dark or flickering dots swirling into a dizzying vortex: the tell-tale signs of coming close to blacking out and fainting. Five weeks ago, this was what was happening frequently after doing something like a simple brisk walk through a big room, or a large store space, within just a couple minutes. I suppose in that sense, I have recovered a lot; yet I'm far from my optimal self to allow me to start running hard core again.
Strength training exercises were a bit better, but not by much. I set my objective to have a full-body workout with 1 – 2 sets per activity. I tried the leg press machine first, since my legs are the strongest part of me. In my fitter running days, I used to be able to do at least one set of 8-10 presses on the maximum setting (173 kg, or over 380 lbs) on this one machine. Now, I was struggling with 133 kg (300 lbs). That's a huge drop, something like over 20% in power. The decrease in my arm strength is even worse, I would reckon closer to 30% for them. My upper body/back declined the least. The vertical presses and rows showed that I only decreased about 8%. My chest was probably kept stronger through all the extra effort I had to use to breathe. I also did some core work, and swung a 35 lb kettlebell for a bit, and then called it a day. Again, it's all relative: knowing that back around Christmas, hauling a medium sized TV up a flight of stairs weakened me drastically for a couple days; so being able to commit to the rigours of today actually seemed like a real victory.
I had a nap when I came home, the best I've had in ages. Afterward, I felt like a totally different person. Maybe my metabolism finally got re-ignited. I feel like I instantly dropped a pants size. Perhaps the muscle work is getting some detox action happening. Maybe enough testosterone was released to make me feel like a bad-ass. I don't know, but right now, even as cramped-up and sore as I am, I finally feel like I shed a wound-up cocoon of depression that was three months thick. It's a little too ambitious to get into this habit three times a week, but using one day off per week for the next month seems reasonable.
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