A week ago I told you I wanted to do five things in the new year: exercise, cut back on social media use, read the Palliser Chronicles, keep getting pictures into albums, and blog four times a week. Things are going fine, mostly. I haven't made a ton of progress on pictures but I've made some; I did not blog four times in the first week of 2022 but there's plenty of time to catch up. The once-a-week approach to social media is a good one, I think, even though it requires some discipline to maintain. And I am really enjoying The Eustace Diamonds, so that one has been easy.
The thing I most wanted to tell you about is the exercise resolution. I think I mentioned already that the book that prompted this resolution, Younger Next Year for Women, advises readers to work up to 4 45-minute cardio workouts per week, with 2-3 weight-training sessions as well. I also think I already told you that this plan seems pretty much straight-up bananas to me, but I am giving it a whirl.
Elwood thinks this is a great plan. (For me. He's not super-motivated to follow it himself, but he's happy to support me in this pursuit of happiness or banana-pants-ness, whichever you happen to call it.) Alex gave me some lifting equipment for Christmas, so I'm good to keep lifting weights in the basement until the COVID situation improves. And then Elwood found a bike trainer for me and helped me set it up in the basement. This one is reasonably sturdy, not too expensive, and pretty straightforward. (It is also moderately noisy, but it's working well for me with noise-canceling headphones.) Elwood also acquired a jumprope, but our basement ceiling is too low for me to jump down there and the weather is too frigid for me to jump outside. The Fifth-Grade Jumprope Champion of Seventh Street Elementary School will have to wait for warmer weather to make her comeback. I also decided to do a two-week Jazzercise free trial, and those workouts are enough fun that I think I'll probably pay for a month or two -- by which time I certainly hope we will have warmer weather and less rampant COVID.
The thing I want to record here is that one week in I am already noticing significant changes in my mood and energy level. I started slowly, with 20- to 25-minute sessions of biking and Jazzercise, but even a little bit of working up a sweat leaves me more cheerful and perky. I didn't just slump around sorting the laundry this afternoon; I put on some music so I could dance while I worked. These things may or may not be causally related, but the correlation is pretty striking.
The weather here has been genuinely dire: ice on the sidewalks all week, bitter cold, another round of ice this afternoon with more bitter cold to follow. I am grateful to be snug and warm -- it is much nicer to be riding my bike to nowhere in the basement than skating on the sidewalks or braving the clouds of COVID-laden exhalations at the gym.
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