Today I was humbled severely.

As some of you may know, my brother and I started an intense exercise program last week. We get up at six in the morning, and then walk for an hour, and then lift weights for about an hour and a half. This goes on four days a week, with Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday as rest days. Today being Monday, we started our second week.

We had decided last week that we needed to pick up the intensity of our cardiovascular exercise in order to get more benefit from it. To this end, we decided to do two days a week of hard cardiovascular, and two days of light cardiovascular to let our bodies recover. (This pattern matches with our weightlifting scheme as well.) One day last week, we walked the fifteen minutes over to Nose Hill Park and climbed Nose Hill, and we decided that this would be classed as a hard cardiovascular, because it is a long steep climb, and we both got our pulse and breathing up a lot doing it. We decided that to gain maximum benefit, we would do a different sort of hard cardiovascular exercise on the other hard day. We settled on jogging.

Our jogging scheme is pretty simple. Basically, we want to be consistent with the hour of cardiovascular work each day, so we planned to do a five minute walk for a warmup, then do (for example) a ten minute jog, and then forty-five more minutes of walking. As we got into better shape, we would lengthen the jog and shorten the walk, keeping the total at one hour.

This morning, we were both very tired--it is very hot in our house, and hard to fall asleep before midnight or so, and so when I get about six hours of sleep every night, I need a day every now and then to catch up. I ended up sleeping in until about nine o'clock, and my brother slept until about eleven. We then planned to go start our workout for the day, but we had a problem--it was now late enough that the sun was high and it was HOT outside, so we thought that an hour long walk might be a poor idea. Also, Monday was supposed to be one of our hard days, so we wanted to jog as part of that hour.

When we had first discussed our jogging, we both remembered past jogging experiences and agreed that a ten minute jog, combined with the walking, would make a good workout. However, in deference to the heat of the day, we decided that today, we would go with a fifteen minute jog and leave it at that, and take the uphill path that led towards Nose Hill to start to add some resistance to the jog.

To our credit, neither of us has done any running in well over a year now. We also picked an uphill route, in the heat of the day. That still sounds like a poor excuse for both of us quitting, panting and wheezing, after a paltry three minutes of jogging.

After that, we just walked back to our house, which took six more minutes. Next time, we're going to set our sights a little lower.

Don Monkey