cw: exercise.
So, I’ve hopped back on the exercise wagon, after a few months of not managing it consistently. Honestly, it was pretty rocky during the whole pandemic — initially, I think I was fairly depressed, and my activity levels took a sharp nosedive during lockdown. While that improved for a while last summer, I just never got back into the habits of daily exercise until recently.
I’ve been pretty good for the last month about doing at least 20-40 minutes of treadmill daily; I walk at 3.0, which isn’t particularly effortful, but it’s better than not doing it at all, and I play a video game while I walk, so I don’t really notice the time passing. (One game of Waterdeep takes about 30 minutes.)
I was definitely feeling the need for more exercise, but having a really hard time getting myself to actually do it. So I finally decided it was time to see if I could get a trainer who would come to the house — a big part of the problem is that I’m so time-strapped that even though the gym is just a block away, the time and effort of getting on shoes and coat and walking over and hanging things up and then repeating all that coming back would effectively add 30 minutes to an hour-long workout session, which was frustrating — also, it’s super-cold in Chicago right now, which is a big disincentive to leaving the house at all.
So I posted on the local working moms group, and got a few different suggestions for trainers who’d come to your house — and I was delighted to see that a trainer I used to work with, Liz Fairweather, was doing at-home training now.
I love Liz — she’s about my age, about my height, and has exactly the kind of physique I’d love to have — strong, muscled, a gymnast’s body (she used to be a professional gymnast). She’s also really good about finding accommodations so you don’t hurt yourself, which I’m finding more important now that I’m 50. My knees can’t take quite as much as they used to!
So, she’s going to come twice a week for six weeks, and then we’ll reassess — I’m not sure if our budget can handle that long-term, but for now, I’m considering it an investment in my health. One of the things that came out of cancer diagnosis and treatment in our family was a resolution to put health first when budgeting money and time — if you don’t have your health, it’s much harder to do everything else.
So, looking forward. We had the first session yesterday (photo is me, post-session, a bit grubby but feeling good), and I slept like a log last night and woke up feeling slightly sore, but in a good way. She’ll be back on Tuesday. 
And in the meantime, I’d like to get back to doing Supernatural VR some days, and swimming some days — although swimming may need to wait until it warms up a little.
It’s silly that having wet hair for a bit makes me not want to walk to the Y to swim, but at this point, I don’t have the energy to fight my weird disincentives; I’d rather just acknowledge work around them as possible. It’ll warm up at some point, and I’ll start swimming again…
(If any locals want Liz’s contact info, let me know, happy to put you in touch.)
