This morning’s weigh-in was slightly less than 170 lbs.
Weighing oneself is a weighty subject, so I’ll weigh in with that topic right off the bat to get it out of the way.
Again this morning, as is my usual custom, I stepped on the scales.
For the ninth day in a row, the scales registered within a fraction of a pound of 170.
That seems to be an indication of stability, weight-wise.
In other matters such as daily workout or lack thereof: some working out was done today.
Not much was done in the way of working out, but there was enough to work up a few drops of sweat. The first part of today’s workout was 250 Calories on the SkiErg.
Going from the SkiErg to the rowing machine, I decided to make that session brief due to the majority of thoughts voting for coffee sooner rather than later.
The rowing session was at a faster pace than yesterday’s 10K but it was only one-tenth the distance and nothing to get “het up” about. In other words, there was no trace of trembling afterwards like there had been after yesterday’s 10K rowing.
Charts and data for today’s SkiErg session.
Finish screen for today’s short rowing session.
Report for today’s rowing session.
Concept 2 logbook view of today’s short rowing session.
The morning weigh-in has become a daily speculation of how low will the weight go?
For a few weeks now, my weight seems to have been trending downward. It has dipped below 170 lbs several times in the recent few weeks.
Losing weight isn’t something I’m trying to do.
On the other hand, I’m not trying to gain weight either.
A little weight loss is perfectly okay, as long as it is loss of fat.
The reason it is perfectly okay to lose weight if it is fat loss is because it’s extremely easy to gain it back. But as I said, I’m not trying to lose or gain weight.
It (the downward trend in weight) is probably happening because lately I’ve been avoiding two things which will add weight very quickly.
Namely, alcohol and sugar. Coffee is always black, unsweetened. I try also to avoid artificial sweeteners which, sadly, stimulate the body to produce insulin because the body “thinks” sugar has been consumed. Insulin is one of the main things in the body’s process for fat storage.
Gabbing about weight changes, fat, etc isn’t the purpose of this blog. The “About” page, if you haven’t yet visited it, addresses its purpose.
It’s about time to say something about today’s workout. So here it is. The workout started with 200 Calories on the SkiErg. The activity of burning those 200 Calories included a few moderate intervals. After the SkiErg session was over, I moved my sitter to the rowing machine. (Would the sitter be called a stander, while a person is standing to use the SkiErg?)
On the rowing machine the goal was set to a distance of 10,000 meters. It was done at a moderate pace which turned out to be 2:12.8 / 500 meters. No intervals, no racing. But after it was finished, my hands were trembling ever so slightly as if I’d been racing.
Perhaps a 10K pace of 2:12.8 is enough to get a person a little bit “het up”?
Chart and data for today’s 200 C SkiErg session.
Finish screen for today’s 10K rowing session.
Report for today’s 10K rowing session.
RowPro graph for today’s 10K rowing session.
Concept 2 online logbook chart for today’s 10K rowing session.
This morning’s weight was 169.2 lbs. This isn’t an actual picture of this morning’s scale reading. The scale I use is digital.
Sliding down the slope of daily weight, I reached about 169 lbs this morning. I haven’t been trying to lose weight. In fact, yesterday I tried to eat more than usual, to help keep my weight above 170.
Perhaps I was dehydrated. Perhaps it is something to do with avoiding sugar more than ever for the past few months.
In any case, I’m not sure if it is good, bad or indifferent that my pants are more inclined to fall down lately and my weight is dropping to or below the vicinity of 170 lbs. (That’s 77.11 kilograms, for those of you who are metric-minded.)
Dieting is not part of my life but I’m very gradually losing weight anyway. As long as my doctor doesn’t worry about it, I won’t fret. But it was enough of a surprise this morning that I was persuaded to take a day off from working out.
Easily persuaded, I was, by one of those lazy little voices inside my head.
Remember the spider I mentioned in yesterday’s blog post? It was on the piano yesterday. I captured it in a jar yesterday morning and released it outside yesterday afternoon.
Well there was a spider that looked just like it in the garage this afternoon. Of course it might not have been the same spider but it definitely bore an uncanny resemblance. So I captured it in a jar and took it out of the garage and a lot further away from the house before releasing it. Photographs below show that furry little 8-legged creature before and after he was turned loose from the jar this afternoon. The spider got a workout, climbing around in the jar and then running at top speed across the ground after it was released from the jar. It kept running until it found a shadowy hole and then it disappeared inside the hole.
Spider in a mason jar.
Released from the jar, the spider was a bit of a blur as it ran across the sandy desert.
In order to get these photos of the spider running, I had to take a video with my phone and then take screenshots of the video.
The spider is a bit blurry, but the red arrow points to where he is as he is running to the entrance of a nice hole.
The arrows point to where the spider is, just before he disappears completely from sight into the hole.
Some people get an endorphin rush from doing things like this. I prefer a tamer approach via the Concept 2 ergs. (For photo credits, see the note at the end of this post)
Hints of the early light of dawn were glowing through the window blinds when I woke this morning. The hint of a glimmer of pre-sunrise glow didn’t cause me to wake.
A finger of a more mundane reason flicked the wake-up switch in my brain. Let’s name it a call of nature. Definitely mundane.
Precisely a few minutes later, I returned to bed with hope of getting another 90 minutes of sleep.
Precisely less than ten minutes after returning to bed, I was wide awake after thinking about the day and realizing that I had some chauffeuring to do in a few hours. The chauffeuring appointment would limit or eliminate the possibility of a morning workout was another realization.
Yen for sleep vanished as I checked the mental dashboard and realized everything would remain in balance if I got out of bed immediately and began the day’s workout right away.
So that’s what I did. Almost. I went directly to the SkiErg right away. But I was thirsty and my water bottle was empty. So I detoured to the water cooler. Filling the water bottle emptied the water cooler. So I went to the garage to get five jugs of purified water. Then I noticed a spider. So I went to get the vacuum cleaner and dispose of the spider. Before turning on the vacuum cleaner, I realized I could save the spider’s life by capturing it in a jar. So I did that. Then turned back to refilling the water cooler. After refilling the cooler I finally went to the SkiErg and set it for 250 Calories. 250 Calories was okay yesterday, so I thought I’d try it again today.
The SkiErg session started slowly and sleepily in spite of the fact that I was wide awake. For the first 150 Calories on the SkiErg, it seemed luxuriously enjoyable to keep the stroke exaggeratedly slow, with each stroke’s drive time lasting about a second or even longer than a second.
The SkiErg pace very gradually quickened during those first 150 Calories. Once the remaining Calories counted down to 100, it felt like the most natural and logical thing to do to indulge in some moderate intervals of 10 calories per interval. So that’s what I did and there was a satisfying harvest of endorphins.
The SkiErg session whetted my appetite for labor-derived endorphins, so I set the rowing machine up for a 10,000 meter piece. On the other monitor, I played a screen recording of the 10,000 meter session I’d rowed and uploaded to YouTube on December 27, 2017. It is one of the more popular of the screen recordings I’ve uploaded to YouTube for people to row along with and has been viewed 254 times so far. I’m guessing it is popular because it includes 8 intervals and intervals make most rowing sessions a lot more interesting.
So I got a natural emotional lift and boost to the spirits so to speak from this morning’s workout. I’ve been enjoying it all day, until late in the day/early evening when I heard some extremely weird news from a close relative who shall not be named here. It was borderline insanity type of news and it had the opposite effect of this morning’s workout. It put a heavy damper on my spirits. A black cloud. But I’m in the process of dealing with it and shooing the black cloud away because black clouds are pollution of the worst sort and I prefer joy and light.
Screenshots of today’s workouts follow. If you look at them closely, the spikes in the heart rate graphs during the rowing session can be disregarded because HR seemed to be normal and that kind of thing – if it happens on the rowing machine but not on the SkiErg and the heart is otherwise behaving normally with regard to rate range – I attribute to the more analog heart rate signal on the rowing machine. (The SkiErg uses a more digital blue tooth signal instead of an analog signal for transmitting heart rate and on any given day, the SkiErg has far fewer, if any heart rate spikes.)
SkiErg chart and data. Notice there are NO spikes in the heart rate graph for the SkiErg session which used a blue tooth heart strap transmitter.
Finish screen for today’s 10K rowing session.
Report for today’s 10K rowing session.
RowPro graphs for today’s 10K rowing session.
Concept 2 online logbook chart for today’s 10K rowing session.
Happy rowing to you!
Photo credit: by Masa Sakano and found on his site on Flikr.
Cats and laziness have something in common. Perhaps they have more than one thing in common, but the particular thing I have in mind at the moment is they are both highly skilled at creeping.
Right away this morning following getting out of bed after sleeping in late, I changed into workout clothes and began a 250 Calorie session on the SkiErg
Each of you in the multitude of those who have been following this blog closely know that my recent usual SkiErg session is 200 Calories, not 250.
Enjoying a bit of a mental boost from doing an “extra” 50 Calories on the SkiErg today, I simultaneously thought of moving from SkiErg session done to starting a 10,000 meter rowing session and coffee. But not in that order. I wanted coffee more than I wanted to sit on the rowing machine for 10,000 meters.
Perhaps laziness had been stalking me, because almost immediately after the thoughts of rowing 10,000 meters and having coffee afterwards began doing a dance in my mind, there came the question of who was leading the dance. Rowing or coffee? Coffee or rowing?
Yelping with joy, laziness crept in to offer a solution to the non-problem. Its suggestion was that instead of rowing 10,000 meters today, I shorten the rowing session by whatever distance would be the equivalent of the extra 50 Calories that had been burned on the SkiErg! Brilliant! I thought it was my own idea and so I immediately calculated that if about 700 meters were subtracted from 10,000, the result would be enough for the two sessions to add up to yesterday’s total of 805 Calories on both machines.
I should have known better. The clue that I was being influenced by creeping laziness instead of my own rational thought was that when the 9,300 meter rowing session started, the thoughts also occurred that since it was a shorter distance than yesterday’s 10K, I could row at a slower pace.
The result was that I came up more than 30 Calories short of the goal of 805 Calories total. So I rowed another 700 meters, to bring the total calories up to yesterday’s. Yesterday’s, plus four more calories. And a lot more total time than yesterday’s 10K. Laziness snickered at its joke on me.
Moral of the story: the feline cat of laziness leads away from felicity of results.
Today’s 250 Calorie SkiErg session.
Finish screen for today’s slow 9,300 meter rowing session.
Report for today’s slow 9,300 meter rowing session.
RowPro graphs for today’s slow 9,300 meter rowing session.
Report for the 700 meter rowing piece which had to be added to bring today’s Calorie total up to as much as yesterday’s.
It has been said that a horse might be enticed to trot by holding a carrot on a stick in front of him
Just as a carrot on a stick might encourage a horse to trot, the thought of coffee after this morning’s workout seemed to give the workout a bit of a boost.
Although I wasn’t consciously thinking of coffee during the workout, the thought of a pot of black coffee came to the forefront of my mind while I was commenting on today’s results in the online logbook.
Virtually the same as yesterday’s workout, today’s consisted of a 200 Calorie SkiErg session followed by 10,000 meters rowing.
And today’s rowing was a bit faster pace than yesterday’s 10K pace, so perhaps the subconscious yearn to hurry up and get the coffee pot going was influential.
Today’s SkiErg session was one calorie less than yesterday’s but it has a very different graph pattern.
Finish screen for today’s 10K rowing.
Report for today’s 10K rowing.
Graphs for today’s 10K rowing.
Concept 2 online logbook chart for today’s 10K rowing. Coffee was mentioned in the comment.
The heart and mind frequently have differences to settle.
Happily, today’s workout turned out to be longer than what was “agreed on” in yesterday’s imaginary conversation with my heart/subconscious.
Up on the mountain it was. Out of reach and trying to dictate that today’s workout should be a brief 200 Calories on the SkiErg and a couple 1,000 meter rowing pieces.
Rather than follow yesterday’s suggestion, I spontaneously opted for not 200 but 201 Calories on the SkiErg. Not much difference on the SkiErg. But then that was followed with not merely a couple 1K rowing pieces, but a full 10,000 meters on the rowing erg.
Right after the 201 Calories was done on the SkiErg, I decided to row 10K before something changed my mind and got right to it.
Along with deciding to do 10K, I decided that the pace goal would be 2:15 or a little faster.
Yackey-yacking with the heart and/or subconscious was avoided today and neither of them seemed to make a fuss. Perhaps they were sleeping in?
The resulting pace for the 10K rowing was 2:14.7 and it felt good.
Chart and data for today’s SkiErg session.
for the 10,000 meter rowing session.
Report for the 10,000 meter rowing session.
RowPro graphs for the 10,000 meter rowing session.
Lately I’ve been doing a little bit of chauffeuring. Not that much, really, but today is a “day off.” The actual average daily time I’ve spent chauffeuring during the past few days of not working out has been only a very scant few hours, therefore any chauffeuring I’ve been doing is a flimsy excuse and not really valid at all for not having worked out. A better excuse would be laziness. But does being lazy justify not doing something?
As of today I’m back at it and wondering what the workout plan will be for the immediate future. I managed to get myself to do a 200 Cal workout using the rationale that it wouldn’t take very long and would be over with quickly and that would be all that I’d do this morning. But then after doing that I felt guilty for not doing any rowing whatsoever, so I sat on the rowing machine and rowed a 1000 meter piece.
Zaniness is welcome with regard to working out but I tend to be conventional on the ergs. So as I said earlier, I’m wondering what to do for the next few days. The picture I get in my mind is of John (that’s me) standing at the base of a mountain whose top is hidden in the clouds. John is looking up in the direction of a voice that is coming from somewhere out of sight. The mountain is rocky, like a desert mountain with no trees, just rocks, stones and boulders. John can hear a noise coming from somewhere up in the clouds. A few rocks are tumbling and bouncing down the slope because there’s movement up there. The distant voice John hears from somewhere up in the clouds says that he could do another 200 Calories tomorrow on the SkiErg and afterwards he could follow that with two sessions of 1000 meters each on the rowing machine.
Yelping to persuade me, my imagination indicates that the distant voice and movement somewhere higher on the mountain above the clouds is my subconscious and/or perhaps my not-to-be-trusted heart. But of course I suspect that my imagination is making it all up so as to persuade me to let it have its way.
The mental image of placing my subconscious higher up and out of sight on an imaginary mountain may have been partly influenced by a passage I read recently in a book by Gabor Maté, MD, in which he states that the higher (physically) the part of the human brain, the more complex and less automatic are the functions of that part of the brain.
Chart and data for today’s SkiErg session.
Finish screen for today’s token rowing session of 1,000 meters.
Report for today’s token rowing session of 1,000 meters.
RowPro graphs for today’s token rowing session of 1,000 meters.
The subconscious will stall and give you the runaround while snickering at you until you take the reins and point the way.
Like yesterday, today had an early start. Also like yesterday, the subconscious ignored last night’s intentions of doing the workout first thing in the morning as it found one thing after another to do.
Eventually, after about two hours of puttering, I realized time was flying by and scattering its feathers through my brain in the process.
Allow the heart to lead and there’s a rain of confusion. Take the reins of the skittish heart and confusion will not reign. I took the lead, held the reins and changed into workout clothes.
Did the SkiErg session first. Everything went okay except there was a computer problem and the session wouldn’t upload with the ErgData app. Manually entered the SkiErg data into the Concept 2 logbook. I’d done the SkiErg session barefoot (so it would be more fun), so next I donned some shoes to protect my feet while they’d be in the footrests of the rowing machine.
While donning shoes, heart and subconscious started snickering and dickering about doing less than 10,000 meters rowing, but I just set up RowPro for 10K and started. The chosen goal was an average pace of 2:15 or better.
The heart seemed to grumble now and then as its rate readout would disappear from the display. But it remained steady overall. It also remained in the appropriate beats/minute range for the the effort – whenever its readout was being displayed.
So everything was okay in today’s workout fray.
No chart and less data than usual for today’s SkiErg session, because a firmware problem was reported when I tried to upload it.
Heart behavior seemed normal except that the heart rate display vanished 4 times during the rowing session
Virtuously early this morning, I rose from bed.
Argument might be made by some that rising early has nothing to do with virtue.
Nonetheless, it somehow feels virtuous.
I will accept virtuous feelings where they can be found.
Surprisingly, that virtue was sort of swallowed by about three hours of doing nothing in particular before finally taking the reins and spurring myself to change into workout clothes and start that sort of work.
Happily, once the workout strokes were started, they flowed unabated until the sessions were adorned with sweat and completed.
In keeping with recent practice the first workout session was 200 Calories on the SkiErg.
Next after the SkiErg a bit of rebellious protest made itself heard from the subconscious realm. It expressed desire to do only 3K rowing today, like yesterday’s had been, instead of the more usual 10K.
Getting right down to business bargaining with my subconscious, we arrived at a prompt agreement to compromise with 5K rowing instead of the full 10K or a more paltry 3K.
So the workout sessions were quickly done and without irregularity on the part of the heart except for what is alluded to in today’s title: four brief vanishings of heart rate from the display.
