Evil Stick Blog

Still in “back-off” mode to ensure I don’t damage myself. I had wanted to start working out again this week, but due to some chaos in evil stick land I’m going to have to continue to take it slow. As it is, though, I’ll still be staying very active as we make improvements on the house this week and hit the still-packed stuff with a vengeance.

Starting next week, I’m going to start everything over. I’ll kick off the pushups from week 1 again, doing those on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I’ll then do the situps on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. Part of the problem I think I ran in to is that I was doing the pushups and situps concurrently on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, possibly overtaxing my system. I’ll give this approach a couple weeks, and see how it goes. If it all goes well, then full steam ahead.

I’m also still on my enforced absence from the treadmill. I figure once the weather starts to warm up in March I’ll begin actually walking outside. in the meantime I don’t feel comfortable using the treadmill as it’s the beast that caused my problems in the first place. I may use it to do some walking, but I definitely won’t be running indoors for a while (if at all).

On a side note, as I was eating breakfast this morning (corn flakes, woo!) I remembered a snack I used to enjoy back in high school - put corn flakes in a cup, add whipped cream, then mix and enjoy! Ahh the halcyon days of youth, when I could eat whatever I wanted without fear of reprisal. Back then I had a theory that I wouldn’t start to get fat until I started working out heavily, as if I didn’t have a lot of muscle I wouldn’t have any muscle to convert to fat due to inactivity. Naive, but it has a certain ring to it, I think.

finished pushups week 4 on Saturday. Still getting harder, but I’m managing to complete the tasks set to me. I’m due for another exhaustion test - I didn’t do it yesterday because I wanted to give my arms time to recover I’ll most likely get to it this evening, which should be interesting seeing as I ran myself especially hard this morning.

Speaking of which, I started week 4 of running this morning, and kind of hit a wall. The program is segments of running interspersed with segments of walking. I run at 5.5 MPH, and walk at 2.5 (it’s supposed to be a brisk walk). The program today was supposed to resemble the following:

• Walk for 5 minutes
• Run for 3 minutes
• Walk for 1.5 minutes
• Run for 5 minutes
• Walk for 2.5 minutes
• Run for 3 minutes
• Walk for 1.5 minutes
• Run for 5 minutes

But my program ended up resembling the following:

• Walk for 5 minutes
• Run for 3 minutes
• Walk for 1.5 minutes
• Run for 5 minutes
• Walk for 2.5 minutes
• Run for 3 minutes, barely making it through
• Walk for 1.5 minutes
• Run for 4 minutes at a slower (5.0) pace
• Give up and shamble along like a zombie for 4 minutes, trying to catch my breath and deal with the stitch in my side

Not exactly what I call a successful effort. So I’m gonna knock myself back a level and finish the rest of the week as if it was week 3. Hopefully I’ll then be able to come out stronger next Monday, and not have 5 minutes of running kick my ass as much. This adjustment will have me running the full 30 minutes by the end of November, which should be pretty acceptable (though I shudder to think of running the day after Thanksgiving with all that digesting food in my stomach).

I’m also going to start level 1 of adapting programs for uses not originally intended. Specifically, I intend to use the running program to train my arms to hold a baritone properly. For those of you who play, you know the hell that can be brought on by a vindictive tech under the guise of “strengthening the arms,” and for those of you who don’t, just take a gallon of milk and hold it about a foot in front of your face with both arms (gallon of milk = about 8 pounds, baritone = about 8 pounds (actually closer to 7)). If you’re anything like me, your arms will prolly start shaking within 5 minutes or so. Ideally the pushups alone will combat this (it’s essentially why I started the program), but I want to make sure all my bases are covered. Looking at the program I use for running, a thought occurred to me - I could probably adapt that program for holding my baritone. If I could hold my horn at 10 degrees above parallel for half an hour, that’d be a Good Thing ™, if for no other reason than I could then simply smile at the aforementioned vindictive brass techs.

My scale still sucks, but it did go down. I think it’s ’cause I had a small dinner, though. Now sitting at 223.6. 38.6 pounds remaining until I’m no longer a fat ass. It’s a motivating factor, to be certain, but the downward march of the scale is too undependable to use as a true measurement of fitness (at least from my perspective).

In case anyone’s wondering why I’m pushing hard on all this stuff now, I thought I’d present one facet of my motivation:

I’m the guy in the blue shorts and shirt, next to the smallest and most hardcore bari player on the planet. I’m standing on a slight rise, here, so the conditions are not necessarily ideal, but one look at my horribly arched back (pushing out my pudge for the entire world to see) and my horn angle that’s actually dipping below level is frustrating. Frustrating because this wasn’t an early-season rehearsal - this was DCA weekend, meaning that I’d been holding that damn horn all summer and this was all I could manage. Unforgivable. This will not happen next year.