Today started as usual with a few minutes outside early in the morning.
For anyone of the few of you who have been following this blog, you will notice that as of yesterday, my daily workout time is increased over what it had been from May 1 of this year until yesterday.
The reason for the increase in daily workout time is a consequence of my most recent blood test results and visit with my doctor. She said my A1C reading has gone up. I’ve been trying to keep it down and so I was puzzled. I told her that I had “cut back” on daily aerobic exercise because “I got tired of doing 20,000 meters every day” and I asked her if she thought that cutting back on daily aerobic exercise might be a significant factor. She said yes. We didn’t discuss it any further during that visit but I resolved to return to what I’d had as a vague goal before May 1st, which had been to burn at least about 1,300 activity Calories daily, according to the activity app on my Apple Watch.
After the doctor visit, I received a written summary and recommendations from the doctor which included that in reference to aerobic exercise I should do at least 150 minutes weekly.
It might have been good if the doctor and I had talked about it a little more, because what I had “cut back” to was about 250 minutes per week, 100 minutes per week more than she recommended. But I thought about it and decided that the important thing was that in her expert medical opinion, the reduction in weekly aerobic activity could very well be a significant if not THE major factor in the rise of A1C level.
So I’m increasing it with the following approach: to do daily aerobic activity as soon as possible each day with the goal of bringing activity Calories up to 1,300 with that aerobic activity, before going on to other things.
So that is what I did yesterday and today. Today, it amounted to a little more than 2 hours and 20 minutes of time on the ergs and a total of about 22,374 meters. It took a long time because average pace was slow. But it wasn’t boring, because I alternated every 10 Calories between slower and faster. Believe it or not, that made it interesting enough to do the entire workout without music, videos, etc. Thoughts were all over the place and a good share of thoughts were on the goodness and awesomeness of God, but in between whatever the non-workout related thoughts were, it was interesting to focus on the effort level, strokes, split time, etc with each alternating slow or faster 10 Calories interval.
At this rate, I’ll be doing about 15 hours instead of merely 150 minutes of weekly aerobic activity. But 15 hours will be in the ballpark of what I used to do… a long time ago in what seems like a distant galaxy…
There were two sessions today for the total workout and there is no screen recording for either one. But there are screen shots. And for anyone interested there are “live” (interactive) charts available, as usual, at the online logbook link further down this page.
Though not all workout sessions for the day are always or even usually mentioned in the blog, data for any workout sessions for any day can be seen in detail via this: link to the online logbook. To view a session’s data and interactive graph click the “+” sign in “Action” column for that session.
Happy rowing to you!