Had a holiday from work today but didn’t capitalize.  I find that without hard times and external commitments to provide time pressure I am liable to fritter away free time in meaningless (rather than meaningful) relaxation.

Some random thoughts from my somewhat wasted day:

1. I REALLY need to get back to doing push-ups.  It’s been a week.  Maybe more.  Bad juju.
2. I am also really Jones-ing for some strength training.  I miss the Starting Strength work I was doing a while back.  I need to look at my schedule and see if I can shoehorn it back in.
3. In the midst of my semi-wasted I did do a few productive things – one of them was a recon for something that I’m going to do on Wednesday that I’ll share here on the blog.  Stay tuned.  It’s pretty cool.
4. I’m making significant progress on my guitar playing.  I’m not good yet, and I can’t even play any songs well enough to sing along with them, but I’m light years ahead of where I was a month ago and I’m really enjoying it.  This has nothing to do with fitness just something I wanted to put out there.

A quick swim just to keep the blood pumping.

For Christmas I got a high-speed, low-drag ANT+ Tanita scale that measures just about every metric you can imagine that it’s possible to measure through the soles of your feet.  Which, trust me, is more metrics than you can imagine.  It connects to my Garmin and then uploads to Garmin Connect.

I’m not really much interested in my weight per se – I think the last time I cared about my weight was for intramural boxing at West Point.  To me athletic performance goals are better indicators of progress or achievement.  If I was going to track a physical attribute as an indicator of health or performance it would probably be body composition (which also get’s tracked by the scale but which I assume is skewed by the collection method).

Regardless, I use the scale because I like collecting random data and studies have shown that people who weigh themselves daily (I’m not that consistent, a couple times a week is the best I do) tend to maintain healthier body weights and better overall health than those who don’t.  Plus graphs!

A couple interesting things from this data:

1) All the data values are within a pretty tight range on the Y-axis so the variations are probably not statistically significant.

2) However, both my body fat percentage and my metabolic age indicators began an upward trend on or around 4-20, which is when I fell off the wagon and my workouts went inconsistent.

3) Lastly, I’d like to highlight that according to my scale I have a metabolic age of 20 years (and in the early weeks of April I was only 13-18 years old!).  Based on that mostrecent metabolic age information and the Social Security Administration’s life expectancy calculator there appears to be a good chance that I’ll live until I’m [does math] 134-years old.

So I’ve got that going for me.

As you can see its been a rough couple of weeks.  All the usual suspects that anyone and everyone blames when they stop doing the things that help them to have a good life and instead start having an easy one.

The bad downward spiral is easier to get into, and easier to stay in and harder to break out of than the good upward spiral but I’m getting better and better at identifying them and taking the right steps.  I think that writing in this online workout journal is helping me to be more aware of what’s going on with my workouts, my workout motivation and why.  It also provides me with an additional mental spur to do the right things.

Here’s to a more consistent month of workouts in May than April.

This run felt like dying.  With the weather the way it is here this time of year I absolutely have to get up and out on runs/rides early before the full force of the sun comes into play.

I had planned to do two laps of this loop but 1) I got a late start and wasn’t comfortable riding in the semi-darkness for the second loop given Thai traffic and road conditions and 2) I was wrung out like a towel.  I am going to go ahead and blame the heat/humidity . . . in addition to my overall poor cycling conditioning.

A cool article about the Google campus bike program.

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/04/google-bikes/all/

I want to have a meeting on one of those conference bikes.

Garmin wasn’t charged up so I tracked this one on MapMyRide with my iPhone.

Then a manual entry into Garmin Connect.