Tag: exercise

Blissfully Quiet Night

My father turned off the television a little after 10:00. He went to sleep pretty much right away. My mother turned off her television a little before 11:00 and seemed to be asleep a short time later. I had my CPAP machine setup and the lights were out around 11:30 but I didn’t get to sleep until just after midnight.

I woke up at 4:30 because my mother was up and walking around the kitchen. She was making breakfast. I got up to check on her and she was fine. She told me to go back to bed. I tried, but I couldn’t sleep. So four hours of sleep is it for me today.

It’s worth it if things keep up the way they did last night. Fingers crossed.

I’m not working today but I have set myself up at the dining room table as if I were. The home health worker is coming at 8:00, and I assume my mother is going to want to chaperone (I’m only kidding a little) so they will all be spending most of the day in the living room. There isn’t really enough room for four people in there these days, so I will bow out. I’ve got lots of music to work on, and lots of The Orville to watch. The Red Sox are on at 1:00. I’ll probably try to find a way to sneak myself into the room so I can watch the game with my father. Other than that, I hope I can be a fly on the wall today and just be here to help my mother with whatever.

After I closed my exercise ring last night I sort of made the conscious decision to go to bed without finishing the laundry so that I would have an excuse to go downstairs and sneak in some walking in place today. It’s 7:23am and 71 degrees outside. Inside I think it’s already around 80 and the humidity is at about 99.9%. I haven’t even started walking yet and I am already drenched in sweat. Hooray.

My mother is watching local cable right now. I think she might be asleep, but the TV is on. It is the Tewksbury Memorial High School Senior Awards presentation. I graduated from that school in 1989 and I don’t recognize any of the voices of the staff, but every time someone comes on to sing the praises of some TMHS athletics program I just want to vomit all over the house. They are still the arrogant pricks they were 30 years ago, and the team name is still the insulting racist bullshit too. Some things never change.

Okay, laundry and exercise, then pills and letting the health care pro inside. Talk to ya’ll later.

Exercise Fail

My plan to close all three rings on my AppleWatch Activity App died a quick and sudden (and more or less expected) death on day three. There just wasn’t time or space or mental stability enough to do any exercise at my parents house yesterday, and I doubt there ever will be. I could have done it all when I got home, but we can chalk that fail up to just the lack of mental stability. I just couldn’t handle anything beyond eating dinner and venting my misery to my beloved wife who was kind and supportive and wonderful to me all night.

I’m in the office today. The four times I came here in July all saw small spikes in the exercise ring. Apparently my walks to the kitchenette or the bathroom are enough to get my heart rate up high enough to trigger the app. Okay. I might be able to use that. So I won’t have a perfect month, or week, for August. Maybe I can still do something.

I’ll keep you updated because clearly you are all hanging on every exercise related word this particular lard ass spews out through his keyboard, right? Right.

Activity App Share

I haven’t been doing my daily walk in place exercising since I started taking Nana-Sitting shifts a couple of weeks ago. I can’t really do it in my parents’ house so I just sort of fell off the wagon.

Earlier today my step son shared his Activity App data with me. He said it was just in case we wanted to have a competition at some point.

Well well well! Well, welly well well well! Hi Hi Hi there, Mr Deltoid!*

I guess it’s time to start exercising again, right? I gotta hold my own against the 18 year old and his boundless energy and limbs that still function correctly. Huh… I might be in trouble here.

I’ve got 13 minutes in today. 17 to go.

*Yes, once again the movie quotes come courtesy of A Clockwork Orange. That movie was so bad ass when I was in high school. Now that I have a wife and a step daughter? I have no plans to ever watch it again. I wouldn’t be able to handle it. Still, the quotes are kind of foundational to me, even if the violence is not.

Potential Exercise Fail

When the clock struck 10 tonight my exercise ring on the activity app was showing six minutes. I need to get to 30 before midnight. My legs are killing me. I’m up to 12 minutes now, but 30 is looking like too steep a hill to climb.

Crap.

Exercise and Sleep

Exercise helps me sleep. I have irrefutable anecdotal proof, or something.

The SleepWatch app for ages used to tell me that the closer I got to the goal on the Apple Watch Activities calorie counter (the Move goal) the better my sleep numbers would be. When I started the 30 minutes a day exercise thing last September I saw that my sleep numbers improved quite a bit.

A few months ago, late January I think, I stopped getting even the minuscule amount of exercise I was getting and saw that my sleep numbers got pretty bad. The restful sleep count went down. So did the sleeping heart rate dip. Everything that seemed to correspond to me feeling better the next day was worse which meant I felt much crappier than I had when I was exercising.

On April 1st I started getting my 30 minutes in again. After only seven days I can already see the sleep numbers getting better again. Especially the heart rate. The last few days have been excellent. Now I’m not really feeling any better rest-wise yet but here’s hoping that comes along eventually. There’s a lot of bad shit going on in life right now. I need all the help I can get.

April Fools Day

I don’t have an April Fools joke or anything. I thought about spelling every word in this sentence wrong or something goofy like that, but no. The crappy song I posted last night will be enough of a joke for this year.

The plan is to start walking again. Let’s get back to closing that exercise ring again, shall we? I’m still keeping up with the fasting silliness. I haven’t been weighing in though. That should start next week, even if the first few are painful.

New month, new routine? Is that a thing?

We’ll see.

Heart Rate

Since I started keeping track of sleep stats a couple of years ago I have learned that one number is pretty much as important to a good night’s sleep as the amount of time I’m asleep. That number is the average sleeping heart rate dip.

For the last month or so my sleeping heart rate dip numbers have waffled between eh and uh. For the few months prior to that, my sleeping heart rate dip numbers were more like WOW!

What changed? Why are things different now?

Is it a statistical anomaly? I haven’t been exercising. Could it be that my heart rate dip is less because my daily average waking heart rate is lower due to not getting jacked through the roof while exercising?

Or am I just not sleeping as well because I’m not exercising? I bet I’m reading too much into this. Whatever, I need a nap.

Though for the record… my exercise ring on the Apple activity app has been closed for today. Let’s get back into it, fatty.

Intermittent Fasting Fails

My intermittent fasting goal is 16 hours. 9pm to 1pm. Roughly. Sometimes I start early but I rarely finish early. I just go for a smidge longer than 16 hours. The goal though, is always 16 hours. If I fail to reach the goal it is because something came up. We had lunch plans with the kids, or someone was nice and made brunch. Stuff like that.

Yesterday I stopped an hour early. I didn’t have a reason. I was just hungry and really wanted some lunch. It was one of those times where I felt uncomfortably hungry. Not quite sick, just not right. Every time that happened previously I stuck it out and was proud of myself when I hit the goal and was clear to eat. Yesterday I more or less chose to fail.

It hasn’t happened yet today, but it’s going to happen again. I am going to eat breakfast this morning. I just hit the 12 hour mark a few seconds ago (8:45am) and I have decided to make some eggs. I am choosing to fail for the second day in a row.

I’m not sure if this is a trend or not. The more stress I feel right now the harder it is to stay on the plan, and I have been feeling the stress ramp up to hitherto unknown levels (hehe, he said hitherto like some smarty pants). I didn’t exercise this week either. It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve done that. It is effecting everything. I need to get back to marching in place for 30 minutes a day. That helps my appetite, my sleep, my energy levels, and sometimes even my back and leg pain levels. I think if I can get back to exercising a little each day I can get back into the intermittent fasting swing of things.

I’m sure I’ll let you all know all about it.