Off My Duff: Readjusting to the School Year

For the most part, I love middle age.  Life is simpler in many ways.  Put simply, I just don't give a crap about quite a lot of things that used to preoccupy me.  All of the self-consciousness of youth is long gone.  Ambitions remain but they're more personal than professional.  In Being Mortal, Atul Gawande writes of how our worlds get smaller as we age.  While I am still well short of elderly, I'm already feeling a need to draw those I love most closer and make the most of our time together, however long it lasts.  Truly, mine is a precious age.

But of course, there are trade offs.  My body doesn't function as well as it used to.  Most noticeably, my once 20/13 eyesight - "You could fly fighter jets," a doctor once told me - is fading fast.  I also can't keep the weight off the way I could in my youth.  Last October, one of the numbers on my blood labs was higher than it should be.  Historically, I have shrugged off these sort of concerns.  This time, the message was different: change your life or you'll be forced into changes you won't like at all.  I had three months to bring the number down for the next blood test and I took the goal seriously.

One of the big changes I made was getting more regular exercise.  I was an athletic child - not a good athlete, mind you, but a genuinely active one.  I played soccer, basketball, baseball, ran track and cross-country.  Adulthood has been different.  Team sports were a meaningful motivator for years but those are harder to pursue as an adult.  

On the bright side, just about the most efficient exercise I can get is going for a walk in my own, beautiful neighborhood.  You scoff.  I can assure you, a walk in my neighborhood is not like it is for most people reading this.  We live in the woods on a dirt road off of another dirt road.  Just to get to our mailbox, we have to go up an 8.5% grade hill.  Do you remember the old FitBits that measured how many flights of stairs you climbed each day?  It's 18 flights just up to the mailbox.  And that's only the first big hill of several on my walk route.  No kidding, it's a meaningful workout.  As long as I'm diligent, knocking out FitBit goals is pretty straightforward.

The big question is what to do in winter.  On the weekends, it's not bad.  I can still strap on the Yaktrax and feel reasonably safe even on icy days.  The problem during the week is the fact that it gets dark so early.  The nearest streetlight is literally miles away.  But we've found you can make a fitness tracker happy by jogging in place.  Cheating?  Maybe.  But I figure it's better for you than vegging on the couch.

Anyway, it all worked.  The number came down.  When I went to the doctor this summer, both my weight and my blood pressure were down, too.  He was thrilled.  

Summer's a relatively easy time to establish healthy routines.  Now that the school year has started up again, I'm finding it harder to meet my goals.  I can still knock out my step count without a problem.  Teaching keeps you on your feet.  But my active minutes are down.  I'm so tired when I get home that I just want to relax.  On the bright side, I'm sleeping better and that's important, too.  But I still want to keep those other numbers down and I know more vigorous exercise is essential.

I got a new fitness tracker several months ago: an AmazFit Band 7.  It's a third the cost of the FitBit I'd been using and, just as importantly, doesn't have the weird battery drainage issues I was experiencing.  The three main categories it emphasizes are steps, exertion and sleep.  It's a real taskmaster on the sleep - senses when I have to get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, for instance.

Among other things, AmazFit tracks Personal Activity Intelligence or PAI.  PAI uses your heart rate data to assess your physical activity over a given week.  The initial goal is 30 PAI, then 50, ultimately reaching the optimum level of 100.  By the end of the summer, I was comfortably above 50.  Just two weeks later, I'm at 24.  I definitely need to make some changes.  

I think the first thing I'll do is raise my step goal.  Since reaching that has been relatively easy, it makes sense to push myself.  But I also need to be intentional about getting additional, more vigorous exercise in the evenings.

And maybe even blogging about it can help.  One thing The Armchair Squid has been very good for over the years is keeping me going with my hobbies.  Writing is a meaningful motivator for me.  Perhaps it can help here, too.