Archives for the month of: October, 2009

A little off track, but not derailed

October 26, 09 //
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I did get through day 2 of week 3 last week, but it was dispiriting enough that I didn’t feel like writing about it. It was dispiriting because it was so hard, and I felt utterly pathetic that I can barely even slow-jog (seriously, at the speed I’m going, “trot” might be a more accurate verb) for three minutes straight. I had spent the earlier part of that evening trying on dresses for my high school reunion, which is never good for my self-esteem; trying on skirts and tops and trousers can be either neutral or even gratifying depending on how well I choose what to try on (needing to go down a size in the business-casual pants I bought a couple of weeks ago, for instance, was an unexpected little ego boost), but for some reason, dresses seem to bring out all the worst parts of my figure. I found some that fit, but none that looked good, not even the one that I bought just because it was such a pretty dress (and cheap). It’s a pretty dress on the hanger, that is; when I put it on, it looks like a nightgown (it’s a size bigger than I usually wear, since they didn’t have my size), and there was no way I was wearing it to the reunion. But the whole thing was just an exercise in frustration and feeling bad about myself, and when I got home and had a hard time on the treadmill, it sent me into a bit of a funk.

Then life, including the aforementioned reunion, got in the way, and suddenly week 3 was over without my having done day 3. It was very tempting—very, very tempting—to let the combination of laziness and frustration continue to take over and just give up, but since I had already decided last week that I would be repeating week 3, I figured I would just treat today as week 3, day 1, take 2. It was still hard, I have to say; it’s possible that I’ll be repeating week 3 more than once. But it’s done, and it wasn’t as hard as it was last week, and as always, I’m glad I did it.

My high school reunion, to which I ended up wearing an evening-ish but fairly plain black skirt and a dressy top (an outfit that turned out to be appropriate, since the majority of attendees were at the same level of dressed-up-edness), was really pretty weird. I don’t know how else to describe it; I was kind of underwhelmed, but not sorry that I went. I liked high school, for the most part, so it wasn’t trauma that kept me away from previous reunions; mostly it was geography, and to a lesser extent, a sense that even though I did enjoy it at the time, high school wasn’t something that I really needed to revisit.

I went with my friend Amy, who is the person I’ve been in continuous touch with the longest, by far (although there was someone at the reunion who I’ve known even longer—since we were 11—and with whom I went to junior high, high school, and college; it was fun to see him too). Amy and I became close friends in our freshman year and have never completely lost touch, though we hadn’t actually seen each other in person since my first wedding, 19 years ago. Going with her was a good idea; she’s outgoing, and recognized people before I did, and made it easier for me to contemplate going at all. Plus we had an extended chance to catch up, which was great; there’s an ease in being with someone you’ve known well for so long that no expanse of years can erode.

There were a few other people I was genuinely excited to see, though not as many as I’d hoped. It was a little surprising how few people remembered/recognized me, though maybe not entirely unexpected. For one thing, I didn’t have shortish red hair in high school, and the situation wasn’t helped by the fact that the organizers had put my married name on my nametag. And there were 750 people in my graduating class. Besides, after about 45 minutes, I started talking to an old friend and more or less ignoring everything else. The friend, Rachel, is someone I’ve thought of fondly many times over the years, so I was delighted to find her again. She and her then best friend, Michelle, who was also there and who I was very pleased to discover actually has an office in the same building as mine, were part of a short stretch late in my senior year and into that summer between high school and college that was oddly formative—it’s hard to describe what was so special about it, but we were parent-less for some of the time and left to our own devices, and we were at a perfect age to take in everything that New York City had to throw at us. The weather was stunning that spring and summer, and the music we listened to was all new and all great, and we lived in each other’s apartments and hit the town at all hours on the least whim, haring off to Chinatown from the Upper West Side at 1 a.m. because someone wanted noodles at Hong Fat or staying out all night dancing at Hurrah, and even now, a particular song or a warm breeze coming through the window at my family’s apartment can send me right back there. It was a strangely amazing time. But I digress.

A few different people mentioned at the reunion that the thing they remembered most about me was my taste in and passion for music, and that was gratifying. A bunch of people asked after Brian Mulligan, who was my constant (platonic) companion for much of my high school years; he and I stayed in touch until our early 30s or so, when we stopped contacting each other not out of any animosity but just out of tacit acknowledgment that we had nothing in common anymore, so I’m not sure where he is, but I think he’d be pleased to know how fondly he’s remembered by many people. And fundamentally, it was good to satisfy my curiosity about some of my classmates, and pleasing to see that most people seem to have done fine for themselves in one way or another; it was comforting somehow to see that we’ve all made it this far, 30 years on. I don’t think I’ll need any more such reassurances for a while, though. One reunion in a lifetime might be enough.

Another decision made

October 21, 09 //
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The Hardest Part, the Allison Moorer record that held my #1 spot for the first few years of the decade is going to be #6 on my list. I don’t listen to it much anymore, but it’s just too good a record to rank any lower.

Still debating whether to try to rank the rest or just to list them all out. The advantage of numbering is that it encourages me to keep my list to a manageable number, and might even discourage me from simply listing every record that I liked more than a little this decade. Which would be lazy of me.

Week 3, Day 1, plus the first 5

October 19, 09 //
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Day 1 of week 3 was a whole ‘nother level of hard, I have to say. There wasn’t any point during the workout when I thought I would have to stop, but I was watching the clock during both of the longer jogging segments. I’m not sure I’m building up as much stamina as I should be by now, and maybe I’m due to repeat a week when I get to the end of this one. But I won’t make any decisions about that until day 3, of course. And first I have to get through day 2, anyway.

So my friend Jason tagged me on Facebook in his top 15, and I’m still nowhere ready to do mine, but progress has been made. After agonizing and fretting over my top 5, I finally nailed it down. Provisionally, of course. So herewith my top 5; the other 9ish may or may not be in the form of a numbered list.

1. The Clientele, Strange Geometry
(tie) 2. Dolly Varden, The Dumbest Magnets
(tie) 2. The Delgados, Universal Audio
4. Scott Miller, Thus Always to Tyrants (I feel like I should apologize to Scott for that relatively low ranking. So: I’m sorry, Scott.)
5. Malcolm Middleton, Into the Woods. (Since this is the new addition to the list from the last version, I should note that I’m not sure this is actually the best of the prolific Mr. Middleton’s albums this decade; you can make a convincing case for A Brighter Beat being better, and I think 5:14 Fluoxytine Seagull Alcohol John Nicotine is a seriously underrated record. But this is the one that turned me into a devoted Malcolm fan, and it’s a perfectly splendid record. If I could somehow make you listen to it, I would.)

Eyebeam

October 17, 09 //
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Cartoonist Sam Hurt has had a Web presence for ages; I can’t even remember when I first discovered that he was online, but I’m thinking it was sometime in the mid to late 1990s, when I was still endlessly delighted by all the obscure things that you could find on the Web. Fairly soon after that, he started putting some of his wonderful “Queen of the Universe” strips online. “Queen of the Universe” is a great strip, and Peaches is an amazing character, but I was still pining for Eyebeam, the strip that introduced me to Sam Hurt.

“Eyebeam” started a few years before I moved to Austin; it ran daily in the Daily Texan, the student newspaper, which was a pretty decent paper when I lived there in 1984-86. Sam Hurt was a law student, and his eponymous lead character was too—a slightly weird and unconventional law student (and in later strips, a lawyer) with a roommate named Ratliff*, a delightful girlfriend named Sally, and a pet hallucination named Hank. “Eyebeam” was hugely popular in Austin, so much so that Hank was nominated for student government at the University of Texas—and won. Reading “Eyebeam” was something I looked forward to every day. The strips were collected in books, and I bought every one of them as soon as each came out, even though I had read all the strips in them. I still own every single one.

I don’t know exactly what I found so appealing about the strip, but I guess it was the juxtaposition of slightly boho domesticity and everyday routine with flights of utter fancy; I don’t know any other cartoon that features a hallucination, much less a hallucination who has a girlfriend. It was also distinctively Austin-y, and for much of the time that I lived in Austin, I adored the place and its lifestyle, so that worked for me too.

I still find the strips both hilarious and charming, though I have no objectivity about them at all and don’t know if anyone else would see the appeal. But finally, I can invite people to find out for themselves, rather than trying to explain the strip to them, because they’re all online, even some super early ones from when Sam was an undergrad. So go read them all (I recommend starting with 1983 rather than the very early strips). And if you do, be sure to tell me what you think.

*I was fascinated by this, because I had moved to Austin along with a good friend from college, Bill Maxwell, who was taking a year off between college and grad school and had decided to spend that year hanging out in Austin, home of his close friend John Ratliff. I had never encountered the name “Ratliff” before—we don’t grow them in NYC (and this was before Ben Ratliff started writing for the New York Times)—and suddenly there were two of them. I considered this an amazing coincidence, though of course since then I’ve met or heard of all sorts of Ratliffs and Ratcliffes, and it turns out not to be a particularly uncommon name at all. But I was very provincial back then.

Week 2, Day 3

October 17, 09 //
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As predicted, my legs were aching on Thursday, and even worse yesterday. It’s not just my quads that feel it, but the muscles in the front of my thighs (that would be the rectus femoris, and yes, I did just look that up), maybe because they take the weight that my quads can’t support. (Although thinking about it, I’m not sure that makes any sense in anatomical terms.) So I deviated from my every-other-day habit for the first time, but I’m glad I did, since a) my legs feel better today—still a little sore, but almost back to normal—and b) this makes two Saturdays in a row that I’ve avoided completely giving in to my usual Saturday inertia, so maybe I can finally break that habit.

I didn’t really have the music in me today.* I was a little shaky from too much caffeine, and though I started out doing the jogging intervals at a slightly faster speed than I’ve done before, I found that I couldn’t keep that up. During the second-to-last jog, I even thought about skipping the final one, because I was flagging. But I didn’t skip it; I got the full workout done, and I think I’m ready for week 3. I’m contemplating doing an extra day of week 2, but I think that’s just me being fearful, so I’ll probably plow ahead to week 3 on Monday. Week 3 looks challenging but doable; week 4 looks like it’s exponentially harder, and I suspect I’ll be repeating week 3 at least once. But then again, I thought that about weeks 1 and 2, so I should probably just remind myself that cliche or not, I really do need to take this one workout at a time.

*This line, which I’ve used for years to describe anything that I did without really having my heart in it, is only indirectly a reference to the cheesy old Kiki Dee song. It’s more a reference to a strip from Eyebeam, one of my favorite comics of all time. I was going to try to explain the strip, but to find it funny, you really have to know the characters, and besides, I’ve just discovered that after years of my hoping this would happen, the cartoonist, Sam Hurt, has finally put all the strips online, so you can just read it yourself. And I’m so happy to have made this discovery that I’m going to do a whole separate post about it.

What is “fire drill”?

October 15, 09 //
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(Another boring technical note: I’m in the middle of switching hosting companies, after repeated site outages this week while I was sending the URL for my portfolio to half a dozen prospective employers. I actually posted this last night, too late for it to be included in my database backup, so I had to reconstruct it through the magic of phpMyAdmin. But I really did write it last night.)

That’s the “Jeopardy” answer to the following question: what two words strike fear into my heart when I’m trying to stick to an exercise program?

I work on the top floor of a building that is trying hard to be a real office building, but still has a ways to go. A lot of it is unoccupied but is under construction as it gradually gets prepared for use by the business school of a local university. (Last year, the construction work meant that the mice and rats that were living in the unoccupied parts were displaced and wound up on the two floors that my company occupies.) And the fire alarm system is constantly under construction too, apparently; for a while, we had false alarms at least twice a week. That means we tend to ignore the alarms, which isn’t the best idea in the world, obviously. But over the summer there were two that weren’t immediately identified as false alarms, so we all trooped dutifully down the stairs. That’s 17 flights of stairs, for the record. Long flights of stairs, too.

There are a few activities that are especially bad for my knee problem (patellar subluxation—I remembered to look it up)—basically anything that involves putting downward pressure on the knee with my full body weight. Cycling is terrible, although I biked for years—not any great distance, but regularly, and my knees got used to it. Running isn’t great, even if I’m ignoring that fact now. And walking down stairs is pretty much the worst. I always have a little bit of discomfort walking down stairs, especially if there are a lot of them, or they’re steep, or I try to go fast. (I get vertigo when I go down stairs too, so it’s altogether not my favorite thing.)

So the first time we had one of these fire drills (shortly after I was moved from the 16th floor to the 17th, not that one flight makes that much difference), I didn’t think too much of it, but the next day, I couldn’t really bend my knees, and walking became painful; even going down the few steps we have in our split-level house was a challenge. It was about three days before I felt normal again. The next time, which was about three weeks later, the aftermath wasn’t quite so bad, but it lasted just as long. And today, when my co-worker came over to tell me that we needed to go downstairs (I had my noise-canceling headphones on and was completely unaware of the alarms…which is a little, um, alarming), my first thought wasn’t “Wow, I wonder if there’s a real fire this time,” but “Oh no, not today—I’m planning to do Day 2 tonight.” But the alarms kept going, and I didn’t have any choice but to trot down the stairs in my high-heeled boots.

At one point I noticed that my knees weren’t bothering me at all, and I wondered if exercise was helping. Then I looked at the number on the next landing. Oh. We were only on the 14th floor. By the time we got to the 3rd floor, my knees would have been screaming if they had vocal cords. And after we’d gotten back upstairs (the alarm was triggered accidentally by some idiot who tripped an alarm panel on one of the unoccupied floors by leaning on it) and the day went on, I could feel the weakness and cramping start to set in, just a little bit.

But when I got home, I did my workout anyway. I don’t know if that was smart; maybe it will make things worse, though I’m not sure why it would. (And I raised the incline on the treadmill a little in the probably misguided hope that the climbing motion would somehow balance out the strain of the downstairs motion.) In any case, it was fine, I’m happy to say—just slightly easier than Monday’s was, which is as it should be. Whether I’ll be able to do it again (or to walk, for that matter) on Friday is another matter. But I’ll worry about that on Friday.

Week 2, Day 1

October 12, 09 //
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I had a million reasons not to exercise tonight…or at least a few: I spent about an hour and a half raking leaves yesterday (Bill did the lion’s share of the work, but I did quite a bit too), and my entire rib cage is stiff as a result; the stand for my new TV arrived today, and I wanted to set both up (Bill ended up doing that for me); I’m in the middle of redoing my online portfolio so that I can apply for jobs, and I really want to get that finished; I got way too little sleep last night, even by Sunday night standards (I always stay up too late on Sunday night), and by the end of the workday, I was really dragging; and it’s our sixth anniversary today, and though we had our celebratory dinner (all-you-can-eat sushi at our favorite place) on Saturday night, we still have some champagne (okay, prosecco) to drink.

So it would have been awfully easy to talk myself out of exercising tonight. But I didn’t. I got home and fed the cats and then got on the treadmill, and I got through day 1 of week 2. It was a little harder than I expected—maybe it’s because I was tired and still stiff from raking, or maybe it was that I did increase my speed a little bit, but the 90-second jogging intervals seemed a lot longer than the 60-second ones. By about the halfway point, though, I started to feel really good, so maybe day 2 will be easier. I’m vaguely nervous about whether I’ll be ready to move on to week 3 next week, and whether I’ll ever make it all the way through, but I’m trying to focus on just the next workout. And I’m looking forward to it.

And I promise to blog about other stuff shortly, or at least I promise not to turn this into strictly a fitness journal. I don’t really expect anyone to read these posts, and I hope the subject lines will serve as a sort of warning that there are boring workout notes ahead. But posting about each workout is part of keeping myself accountable; it’s harder to back out of something when you’ve made a fuss about it publicly. I have enough self-doubt to suspect that I may still find a way to back out, but every little bit of accountability helps, I think.

Week 1, Day 3, or I Exercised on a Saturday

October 10, 09 //
2

(Before I get to the exercise stuff, I would like to mention that I am watching the playoffs, and I’m deeply disgusted that the Cardinals—one of only two National League teams that I like/root for/care about—are about to get swept. By the friggin’ Dodgers. Feh. I guess my visions of a thrilling Yankees-Cardinals World Series aren’t going to be realized.)

Last night was a typical Friday night for me, after a bad workday to end a bad work week: I got home, vegetated in front of the TV for a while (the Yankees were on, after all), and suddenly it was 8:30 and I hadn’t eaten dinner or even moved much from the couch. On the rare Friday nights when I have been able to get myself to exercise, I’ve done so almost immediately after getting home; that’s the only way it works. Instead, last night I ended up eating dinner around 9:30, “napping” from 11:00 till 1:30, staying up till 4:00, and waking up way too early, feeling as if I hadn’t slept at all. This was not the greatest setup for getting Day 3 in today, but I managed to talk myself into it, and I’m (of course) really glad that I did. It was a slightly odd workout: the jogging intervals seemed to come up a lot faster, because the walking intervals seemed shorter than on previous days, but on the other hand, the jogging was easier, and I really felt like I could have sped up. (I didn’t, but I might try increasing the speed just fractionally when I get into week 2.)

I continue to feel great after the workout, too. It’s a little surprising that I feel so good right now, because after I worked out, I shampooed the carpet, which always wipes me out. (And puts the exercise I’m doing now in a little bit of perspective—pushing that heavy carpet shampooer around is way harder than doing a little bit of jogging on the treadmill.) But I do feel great. My knees—excuse me while I knock on every piece of wood I can find—haven’t hurt at all, and though I’ve had a little bit of foot/ankle pain while jogging (I have super weak ankles; if anyone knows good ankle-strengthening exercises, please share them), it doesn’t stick around after I’m done. So, so far so good. And happily, I think I’m ready to move on to the 90-second jogging intervals that week 2 will bring.

I was thinking about my lack of a major goal for doing this, and it occurred to me for the first time that the program results in being able to run 5 kilometers, regardless of whether or not you enter a 5K race. Seems to me that that’s a pretty great goal in itself, really. I don’t know that I’ll get there, and I’m sure I won’t get there in the 9 weeks that the program allows for; I didn’t get there the first time I tried the program. But I’d like to at least aim for it now.

Week 1, Day 2, plus some music stuff

October 8, 09 //
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Music stuff first:

So it’s a little less than three months from (!) the end of the ’00s, a time when all good obsessive list-makers start thinking about their best of the decade. I’ve already had a few people share their top 15 lists with me, and though I’m not sure why they did top 15s rather than top 10s (maybe 10 is too few for a whole decade?), I’m going to go with that number too. I already know what my favorite of the decade is (and my list will be my favorites, which may or may not be the ones I think are objectively the best), and I’m pretty sure I know what will be in my #2 and 3 slots, but after that, things get really, really tricky. So I’m going to try out a bunch of versions of the list here—that’s the main reason I was contemplating reviving the blog before the C25K thing actually pushed me to do so—before committing to anything like a final one.

Not tonight, though. This is just my official statement that I’m contemplating the contemplation of my list. Because so far, I’m seriously stuck on what #4 is going to be, and I can’t go any further with the list until I figure that out. Will it be “The Hardest Part” by Allison Moorer, which was my slam-dunk #1 for the first few years of the decade but which I don’t listen to much anymore, so that putting it at #4 seems more like a concession to its previous supremacy than to its actual current place in my heart? Is it Patty Griffin’s “Impossible Dream,” a record that I don’t love start to finish but which contains three of my favorite songs of the decade, including one (“Useless Desires”) that I count among my favorite songs of all time? Is it “Okemah and the Melody of Riot,” because I think there should be a Jay Farrar-related record in my list and I can’t include “The Slaughter Rule” because it’s a soundtrack, even though it might be my favorite Farrar record of the decade? Is it a Sam Phillips record, and if so, which one? Or wait—honestly, if I’m going by the records that have given me the most pleasure during this decade, it really has to be “Couples in Trouble,” even though I’ve lost some of my enthusiasm for Robbie Fulks in recent times. Okay, so that’s #4 nailed down; but you can see why I need to work this list out in blog form before I can even think about talking about it anywhere else.

So, the list so far, then:

1.The Clientele, “Strange Geometry” (2005). I’d be lying if I said any record released this decade had given me more pleasure than this one.
2. Dolly Varden, “The Dumbest Magnets” (2000). But if any record had given me more pleasure than #1, it would be this one. I have to admit, though, that I feel ever so slightly weird about putting it ahead of the artist represented in #3, because he’s pretty much been my artist of the decade, one of the few artists who…okay, I can’t think of any way to phrase this that won’t make certain people tease me, so let’s just move on to #3:
3. Scott Miller, “Thus Always to Tyrants” (2001). And if I decide not to be a stickler for precision, this spot will actually be occupied by an imaginary double record that includes “Thus Always” and “Are You With Me?”, but for now, I’ll stick to records that actually exist.
4. Robbie Fulks, “Couples in Trouble” (2001). This is one spot where the distinction between “best” and “favorite” needs to be reiterated, because I definitely don’t think this is Robbie’s best record. It’s not even his best record of the decade—”Georgia Hard” is, objectively, a much better record. But fuck objectivity; this is my list. And I love this record. Not every single second of it (hi there, “Brenda’s New Stepfather”), but most of it, and more of it, I think, than a lot of other Robbie fans do.

Gah. Stupid sieve-like brain. I wrote all of that, and then I watched some TV and took a shower, and as I was getting out of the shower I thought, “Oh, wait. The Delgados.” And now everything other than the Clientele record is up in the air, because I can’t even decide whether “Universal Audio” (and it will be that record, not “Hate” or “The Great Eastern”) is going to bump Dolly Varden and Scott Miller, or just Scott Miller, or neither. I’m thinking it’s going to be at #3, but it might sneak up to #2, I don’t know. How am I supposed to decide? It’s like asking me which of my cats I love more.

Okay, that’s the list thus far. I’m thinking Patty Griffin is going to be at #5, but I’ve made enough decisions for one night. And now, on to the boring C25K stuff:

Day 2 is done and dusted. Yay.

Probably because this is all still new (and because I was having a crappy day at work…a crappy week at work), I looked forward to it all day. I’d been a little apprehensive that it was going to be harder than day 1, but it wasn’t; if anything, it was a little easier. I mean, it wasn’t easy, but there were intervals where I wanted to jog faster and/or longer and felt capable of doing so. I didn’t, because the program stresses that the big mistake beginning joggers/runners make is to go too fast too quickly, and I want to be careful of my tendency with any exercise program to push too hard at first and then burn out really fast. (Not to mention that I want to be nice to my knees). But I feel good for having done it, and I feel optimistic about being able to move on to week 2 next week.

But first, on to day 3! I’m not sure if I’ll do that tomorrow night or wait till Sunday (Saturday would be best, but I know myself well enough to know that exercise + Saturday = not going to happen), but I’d like to press on and do it tomorrow night. I just need to make sure to get going shortly after I get home; otherwise, the urge for a Friday night nap will win out over good intentions.

Week 1, Day 1

October 7, 09 //
4

Extremely boring technical note: I spent a truly ridiculous amount of time tonight upgrading my WordPress installation, which was approximately 9,079 generations out of date. The last time I upgraded, it was absurdly simple, but this time, it resulted in disaster, partly because I deleted some of the files before I’d backed them up (an accident caused by my FTP client hiding the “transfers” window, so that I didn’t realize the files weren’t finished downloading), and partly because when I got to the final step, I got a blank page when I clicked on the link to upgrade my database, which (it took me several panic->restore from backup->tear hair out attempts to determine) was caused by Firefox or one of my Firefox plugins not playing nicely with WordPress. It’s now after midnight, and I’ll be getting up in not that many hours, but I wanted to at least start this post.

Because I started something else tonight: the Couch to 5K Program (C25K). I’ve been leading up to it for a few weeks by doing a less organized version of it: I would walk for 25 minutes or so, and at two or three points during the walk when I felt able, I would start running for 1-2 minutes. But now I feel like I’m ready for something a little more structured.

I am starting the program with a ton of disclaimers:

  • I’m not designed to be a runner; I’m top-heavy, old, and mildly asthmatic, and I have bad knees*. And to borrow my friend Marie’s great line, I have always had a strict no-running policy.
  • I’m starting the program without actually intending to run a 5K. My short-term goal, insofar as I have one, is to be able run a mile without switching to walking. As a bigger goal, I’d like to become someone who runs as her main form of exercise, but that seems like a long shot, honestly.
  • I started this program once before, and got pretty far with it. In fact, I ran a mile without switching to walking…once, I think, or maybe twice. And then something distracted me, I quickly fell out of the habit, and here we are. That was a bunch of years ago—can’t remember how many, but at least 5—and in the interim, I have tried and failed to get any exercise habit to stick. I am not, and have really never been, a yo-yo dieter, but I’m a yo-yo exerciser. I don’t love to exercise, but there are forms of exercise that I enjoy…and yet ten months is the longest I’ve stuck to any of them at a stretch before getting distracted and quitting exercise entirely for an equally long stretch.
  • For now, I’m running on a treadmill rather than outdoors, despite the beautiful fall weather and the availability of trails, roads, and a track that I think is open to the public nearby. This is partly out of self-consciousness, because I’m embarrassed for people to see me only able to run for 60 seconds at a time; partly out of lack of desire to leave my house once I’ve returned from work, because even if I’m not exactly snuggling with the cats while I’m on the treadmill, at least I’m not actually out of the house; and partly because I’ve been getting through my workouts by watching episodes of the addictive Brit soap opera “Mistresses” on my iPhone while on the treadmill. (I’m already into season 2, which was the final season, so I’m going to have to find something equally addictive and absorbing to carry me through the remaining weeks of the program.) But anyway, I’m treadmill-running, which isn’t even exactly the same as real running. It will have to do for now, though.

But still, I want to do this. I acknowledge that I may quit. I may quit after the first week; hell, I may quit during the first week. I may run the world’s slowest mile if and when I do run one continuously. (When I was younger, I could walk a mile faster than I could run one, and yes, I realize that makes no sense.) I may have to repeat weeks 1 and 2 twelve times each. But I still want to do it.

Why? Yeah, I’m not sure what the answer to that is. It might be that I’ve always admired and envied runners, who seem to get so much more, mentally as well as physically, from their workouts than those of us who do stuff like step aerobics and kickboxing (two forms of exercise that I actually enjoy but don’t have any sort of transcendent relationship with). It’s partly that I’m sick of being fat and out of shape, although I’m being quite sincere when I say that this isn’t about my weight.** But mostly, I think I want to prove to myself that I can do it.

So can I? Well, obviously the jury is still very much out on that. But after being sure that I wasn’t even ready for week 1, day 1 (which is 5 minutes of walking to warm up, then intervals of 60 seconds jogging, 90 seconds walking for 20 minutes), and doing a pre-week 1, day 1 trial on Sunday night (15 minutes of intervals instead of 20), I surprised myself a little bit tonight by doing the whole warmup + 20 minutes and throwing in an extra 5 minutes of walking at the end. And I felt genuinely great afterwards, just as I had on Sunday night, which was the first time that I got any inkling of that “runner’s high” thing that people talk about. (I used to get a similar rush of endorphins back when I was a devoted lap swimmer, but it’s been a long time since I felt that good after exercising.)

Will I make it to Week 1, Day 2 (scheduled for Thursday night)? We’ll see. I hope so, though, and I hope that blogging about it will keep me from quitting as readily as I otherwise might. I’ll try to blog about some other stuff too, to keep this from being, y’know, one of those blogs; I’ve been wanting to revive the blog lately anyway, so that I’ll have a place to write about music again. But I’m going to try using this as a fitness journal too. We’ll see.

*Not as bad as they used to be, it should be noted, but still bad. I have this weird patellar thing that I can never remember the name of, but it sucks. Evidently my quads have gotten stronger over the years, though, because I don’t have nearly as much pain or discomfort as I used to. But I’m probably still not really supposed to run.

**Weight and body image are subjects about which I could write several encyclopedias; I’m certainly not happy with my weight, and you don’t want to know about my body image. But on the other hand, it occurred to me recently that my weight has been stable within about an eight-pound range (except for a stretch the year my mom died when I lost a bunch of weight) throughout my 40s, and though it’s higher than I’d like it to be, at least it’s been heading in the right direction in the latter part of my 40s. I haven’t been making lifestyle changes or anything—that’s far too grandiose a way to put it—but in the past few months I have been thinking more about how I care for my body and what I put in it. I’ve been trying to cut down on processed foods, and I’ve given up aspartame; I’ve cut way down on bread and pasta and cheese. But I still have a raging sweet tooth, so I can’t claim too much virtuousness. Mostly, I’ve been trying to make sure that I eat fresh food, especially vegetables, every single day, and if that hasn’t made much difference in my weight, it has made a big difference in how I feel.