• Tag Archives exercise

  • Habits Changing

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                                       Mountain Spring Moon

    That new habit? Already changing. Figured out that drinking lots of water during my afternoon workouts made my night’s sleep get interrupted. Often enough to be annoying. So, I moved my workouts to mornings, starting this morning. Several positives came into focus in addition to having the whole day to get rid of excess water: cooler, a good thing for summer days. Leaves afternoons and early evenings free. An endorphin boost in the am is good. No sun coming in through the loft door makes the TV easier to see.

    So, I have to rejigger my schedule again, accounting for the first hour of the day as exercise, then breakfast. Thinking about that now.

    Tonight Kate and I will go into Denver to Dazzle Jazz for an evening of jazz in classical music. A good mix for us since we’re classical music and jazz fans, about 5% of the musical audience according to a DJ from KBEM in Minneapolis

    I just reviewed the first pass at the light and shade study. We may not have many options for vegetables. I’m going to repeat the study in a month with better defined areas and more systematic spots for taking the pictures, make them uniform from hour to hour.


    📂This entry was posted in Garden Health Music Original Relation Our Land and Home 📎and tagged

  • Mind/Body

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                                                Waning Bloodroot Moon

    The yard!  The yard!  If Tattoo had been here this winter, he’d have gotten pretty excited about this dreary muddy mess now more visible than not.  The mountain of snow over which I could not see as I degaraged my Celica has melted to foothill levels, allowing me sights not seen for two + months.  Yippee.

    Business meeting this morning and we acknowledged both the new tax burden and our wisdom in saving adequately to deal with it.  This transition year into the retired life has had surprises, mostly pleasant ones, but this one caught us up short, at least at first.  We have enough money to pay the taxes and still go on with our cruise.  I’m glad because I’ve already got that Panama hat picked out.

    I’ve entered a new phase of physical activity, one with not only aerobic and resistance work, but also with body movement exercise like the Tai Chi and the Body Flow class at the Y.  It feels different, maybe better.  The better aspect comes with the more body friendly Tai Chi, yoga and pilates.  Aerobic and resistance are necessary to retain muscle mass and heart/circulatory system health, but the others work the body in a way designed to calm, loosen, stretch.  The Tai Chi, too, has a strong element, as does yoga, of the Eastern mystical.  Yoga as taught here has lost much of that, but the Tai Chi world remains rooted in the ancient Taoist traditions of China.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Asia Faith and Spirituality Family Retirement 📎and tagged

  • Body Flow

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                                        Waxing Bloodroot Moon

    Some of our front yard is visible!  This is the first time in over 125 days, maybe more.  A friendly patch of brown lawn and the base of a spruce, an amur maple and a pine tree.  The bloodroot cannot be far behind.

    Two tours today.  A Japan tour that reminded me why I love the Asian art so much.  Great kids.  I prejudged them as potentially inattentive, non-talkers.  Boy was I wrong.  We barely got past the teahouse.  A second, Titian tour, had about 30 folks.  Again an engaged and interested group.  The Titian exhibit has been a pleasure to tour, too.  I love the Renaissance anyhow and these are great images.  Love that Bassano and the Lotto, too.

    Kate and I will hit our first Body Flow class tonight.  I don’t know what to expect.  It’s a combination of T’ai Ch’i, yoga and pilates.  To music.  When I found out it was set to music, I almost decided not to go.  I’ve never done group exercise and doing it to current dance songs doesn’t seem to add much.  But, we’ll see.

    Japan.  Hard to know what to say.  As the big history guy I’ve been listening to off and on over the last couple of months keeps saying, our developed civilizations are so complex that they are very fragile.  Japan is teaching that lesson in a too vivid, too painful way.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Art and Culture Asia Commentary on the news Great Work Weather +Climate 📎and tagged

  • Carpe Diem

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                                      Waning Grandchildren Moon

    Over to Rum River Central Park this morning inspired by Emma.  Her death reminded me life flees behind us as the ancientrail of our lifetime grows longer and longer.  This day is all we ever have, so we cannot allow habitual, customary or rigid behaviors to steal it from us.  I had grown away from my every morning exercise at Rum River Park or, in winter, at the park behind the Rum River branch of the Anoka Library.  I don’t even remember when that transition happened.  When the treadmill and the resistance work came into the house, I imagine.  They are not exclusive of each other, inside workouts and outside.

    Here’s one solution I’m trying now.  Three days a week interval training on the treadmill and resistance work alternated with three days of a steady pace outside, either on foot or on snowshoes if we get enough snow.  I used to do the snowshoes every morning in the winter when we had good snow.

    The Rum River time this morning was not without problems.  Biting flies, mosquitoes and the variability of the trail all made it less than desirable.  Plus, I’m not in as good as a shape as I was when I did it before.  Bug  juice will solve one of those problems and increased resistance and weight loss the other.  The variability of the trail will become a plus again, as it was in the past, as I get used to it again.

    Carpe diem.


    📂This entry was posted in Dogs Health 📎and tagged

  • Mens sana in corpore sano

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                     Waxing Flower Moon

    VO2.  I’m not even sure I know what it means though I do recall that bicycle racers have an abnormally good rate.  Still, on Monday next, I’ll know for sure that I’m not a bicycle racer.  But, I may know a bit more about my exercise physiology and what kind of things will work best for me.

    Mens sana in corpore sano, a healthy mind in a healthy body. This is a Roman interpretation of the Greek ideal, one I’ve believed in since coming in contact with it many years ago.  I have, from time to time, managed a healthy body, then a healthy mind, but getting the two together has proved formidable, especially so as I get older.

    So, I went over to the institute for Exercise Medicine and had them put me through my paces with a VO2 mask and heart leads.  They also had me do a stretch test, a jumping high test, measured my blood pressure and, oops, took my body fat.  The body fat was in the margin on all parts of my body except my tummy, which managed a wide divergence from a healthy norm.  This did not surprise me.

    I peddled for 15 minutes on a bike with a blue mask (this guy is not me.)  At the end they then had me go two more minutes.  It was not too tough a test, but I don’t find out my results until next week.

    What I want is a better handle on my workouts, a handle related to this actual body that I have rather than the statistical average I’ve worked with in calculating my workouts up to this point.  I also need a push to get going again on resistance and flexibility work.  I’m hoping this will do it.

    An interesting experience.  Worth it.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Health 📎and tagged

  • An Author New To Me

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                               Full Wild Moon

    An unusual day for me.  Up early, I got downstairs and had my 1,500 words in before 11:30.  I fed the dogs and began reading a short story, Duel, by Heinrich von Kleist, a German writer.  I read a remark about his work, that it was among the best in the German language, probably the best in the 19th century.  The writer of the article compared Kleist to Borges and said though that the author closest to him was Franz Kafka.  OK.  Borges and Kafka are two of my literary gods.  Kleist never wrote anything longer than a novella, didn’t leave much at all, a few short works, some plays and some anecdotes.  Someone collected them in one book.

    This guy amazed me, as he would anyone, by the density and length of his sentences; yet also he impresses with their clarity and the fact that each phrase pushes the story further, not only further, but in a direction not predictable from what has gone before.  This story is maybe 12 pages long, but I didn’t get far in it, so mesmerized was I by his language.

    Kate brought home lunch.  We ate.  I took a nap that knocked me out of the nuclear moratorium hearing today at the capitol.  I find myself increasingly unwilling to go into town for single events in the afternoon.  I wish it weren’t so, but there it is.

    Then I worked on my 1600-1850 tour and this and thatted around until I missed my exercise.  I almost never miss exercise and never when I have the time.  Yet I did tonight.  It felt very transgressive.  Anyhow, I’m done with the night and we’ll start over tomorrow.  One good thing about exercise and me is that I have been at it long enough that missed nights, even missed weeks don’t throw me off.  I get right back up and start again.


    📂This entry was posted in Letters Writing 📎and tagged

  • I’m Not Sure I’m a Unitarian-Universalist. I Suppose That Removes All Doubt.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    43 bar steady 30.01 0mph NE dewpoint 36  Spring

                 Waxing Gibbous Moon of Growing

    At last.  A night where I was not the biggest loser at sheepshead.  Bill Schmidt and I tied for high for the evening.  I had great cards and some good luck, plus I’ve had a long lesson in sheepshead from masters.  It was fun to do well at last.  We’ll see if I’ve actually learned something as the games continue.

    Kate and I watched Mission to Mars, most of it.  A surprising, hopeful Mars film.  Many films about Mars end with everybody dying, but this one offered an improbable, but not impossible conceit about how life came to earth.  What?  You’ll have to catch it to find out.

    Tomorrow I have two tours, a Weber and a Concerning the Spiritual in Art, focused on non-Western religions.

    The presentation for Groveland took an odd, but interesting turn today as I got ready to get started.  I had decided to face head on the question of UU identity by talking about identity development from a psycho-religious perspective.  The idea was to offer resources Groveland could use to develop a UU identity.   When I began to write, I started with a couple of U-U jokes.  Then I remembered an old anthroplogy lesson about joking behavior.  Our jokes define the boundaries of our group; they are an important device through which we can know who is in our group and who is not.  I’ll explain this a bit more later, but the presentation should be a lot of fun.

    Due to various things I didn’t exercise from Saturday through Tuesday.  My back began to spasm and remind me one of the good reasons for all this time I spend with weights and flexibility work.  So, I got back to it yesterday.  Yesterday and today I did a particular series of movement exercises which go a long way toward a more limber me.  They worked.  All better now.


    📂This entry was posted in General 📎and tagged

  • An Everything-0-Meter

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    43  bar falls 30.27 0mph SSW dewpoint 12 Spring

              Last Quarter Moon of Winds

    Had a great time with the two Weber (Japanese special exhibit) tours.  Grace Googin was there for the first one and I had about 15 on the other tour.  Folks seemed to be into it and thanked me a lot after we were done.  This is the first tour in a long time where knowledge accumulated over time has begun to break through in the tours.  I know, for example, the linkage between Chan Buddhism from China and Zen in Japan.  Not like an expert of course, but certainly at a level that helps folks on the tours gain a deeper appreciation for both.

    After the tour I drove over to Interior Gardens where I picked up an everything-o-meter that will make the hydroponic part of the work so easy it will almost grow by itself.  Well, not quite.  It measures electrical conductance, ph and temperature, all three important data points for the reservoir of nutrient solution.  Also picked up 100 more pellets for starting seedlings and three bottoms for the other flats.  We’re in day three of the sprouting process.  Sometime in the next week we should see some shoots.  Fun.

    The woman at Interior Gardens I remembered because she had injured her leg in a running accident.  That was about ten months ago.  During surgery the orthopedist discovered that her cartilage had pulled a divot of bone out of the knee.  This made it difficult of reconnect everything and she’s still not fixed.  She’s a runner, too.  “Oh, well.  If they can’t fix it, I’ll get into biking!”  She has a cryogenic device she puts on it at night that takes the pain right away.

    On the way home I was, unfortunately, really hungry–back to back tours with no food in the middle–so I (you might want to cover your eyes for this part.) stopped at McDonald’s and got a McFish, which, also unfortunately, I like.  By the time I got home I was sleepy, no nap, and feeling guilty.  Guilt won and I just finished 40 minutes of aerobic workout on the treadmill. 


    📂This entry was posted in Art and Culture Garden Great Work 📎and tagged