The full list
2. 70 pages into The Sound and the Fury
16. Went to the gym today with my new workout buddy! Seriously, of all the things I learned in the Boy Scouts, the buddy system seems to be the most important.
17. Board game drafted and board started! I need to buy some beads (to use as tokens) to keep score with.
18. Contacted my local Habitat for Humanity, but haven't heard back yet. It's probably too cold to have a project going.
24. So far, I have listened to 1 hour (and only 1 hour) of commercial radio. In that hour I heard only 9 songs, and this song twice.
27. Notice the widget via LibraryThing.com for books I've reviewed in the right hand column? Why didn't anyone tell me they made a widget sooner?
30. We've got 2 things left to do on our to-do list for January: get a pair of pants hemmed, and sort out our wedding photos.
1. Read In Search of Lost Time (A Remembrance of Things Past)
In Fun Home, Alison Bechdel writes "It's said, after all, that people reach middle age the day they realize they're never going to read Remembrance of Things Past." That quote struck a nerve with me, and once I decided that 2013 would be my year for Remembrance... the rest of this list started to take shape.
I'm not any good at it. There are plenty of people who are phenomenally strong at their favorite exercise- they started strong in one area, so they excelled at that exercise, so they did it often, so they improved quickly, so they excelled.
The thing I like about the Russian Twist, and about most of the exercises in the Power Hour I've tried to make a part of my weekly routine, is how hard it is.
I find that difficulty inspiring, challenging and rewarding. But the reverse of that is recognizing my limits. I simply can't handle a workout at that level four consecutive days. Instead this semester, I'm trying a couple other fitness classes on my "off" days.
(How strange and surprising and interesting that I enjoy and, to a degree, depend upon the class structure to motivate me. Although I interact with and depend upon a team of colleagues at work, at the end of the day I complete my work alone, dividing and conquering vastly more often than collaborating. I find blogging a solitary sport, despite the encouraging comments left by readers. Reading, perhaps my favorite activity, is distinctly solitary.)
So, on Tuesday I attended my second ever Pilates class. It's a very different kind of workout than the cardio-intensity of Power Hour, and I suspect I'm going to have to learn how to get the most out of it, in a way I didn't have to learn in the fast paced class. The movements were challenging (in a couple cases overwhelmingly so), but I wasn't at the end of class left with the exhaustion and 'burn' feeling that I've come to equate with a successful workout.
Which needs to change? It seems that either I have to learn how to maximize my Pilates workout to get value from this new class, or I have to adjust my definition of what the evening after a workout feels like.
I find reports on this study of the effects of exercise on memory quite interesting.
The basics:
Immediately after the strenuous activity, the cyclists had significantly higher levels of a protein known as brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, which is known to promote the health of nerve cells. The men who had sat quietly showed no comparable change in BDNF levels.
For some time, scientists have believed that BDNF helps explain why mental functioning appears to improve with exercise. However, they haven’t fully understood which parts of the brain are affected or how those effects influence thinking. The Irish study suggests that the increases in BDNF prompted by exercise may play a particular role in improving memory and recall.
It makes sense that a release of proteins that produce healthy nerve cells would make the brain, that big ol' bundle of nerves, work better.
For the last few years (as I found myself in more sedentary jobs, after years of physically intense jobs while I was in school), I've felt that my memory was getting worse. I've never been good at connecting names and faces, and the kind of memorization we were expected to do in school never interested me.
But I've definitely felt that my memory for conversations, for instructions, and for all those "what did I come into this room for?" moments was getting worse. I won't pretend to believe that my memory has improved at all just because I've been exercising more in the last 6 months. But it would be nice to believe it.
Went to the gym this morning. 6:00 AM power hour.
Love it, need it, know it's good for me.
But man oh man, are my legs sore. Among the tortures exercises we put ourselves through, we did a lateral step wearing resistance bands around our ankles- just push your leg out and in from feet together to shoulder width apart, as fast you can, for about 20 seconds on each side. Repeat.
On the bright side, I've lost 15+ pounds in the last six months. But I've been feeling the down side all day.
