As I’ve written before, I have very mixed feelings about the gamification of exercise. Still, the extremes that FitBit goes to are, well, extreme. Such as yesterday, when I took a couple of very long walks with the dog:
Tag: walking
2023-09-16 12:05
After a frustrating experience a couple of months ago, when Houlihan’s wasn’t serving outdoors, I decided to risk it again. Round trip walk from home will be well over 4 miles.
2022-05-16 12:05
Or rappelling! (Trail sign in Giant City State Park.)
2022-02-05 15:05
I’m not sure who ought to clear the sidewalk on Route 45 near Curtis, but somebody should. I’m fit enough to clamber over three-foot snow walls blocking crosswalks, but hundreds of my neighbors are not. @Applebees @cvspharmacy @SchnuckMarkets
2022-02-05 14:42
I’m not sure who ought to clear the sidewalk on Curtis Road next to the U of I Solar Farm, but somebody should. I’m fit enough to trudge through the 12-inch snow, but hundreds of my neighbors are not. @UofIllinois
2022-02-01 12:23
The pale green lichen and the dark green moss are what caught my eye, and then I thought, “Oh, this might be worthy of a #thicktrunktuesday post!”
2022-01-12 14:24
Walked the Homer Lake perimeter trail with @jackieLbrewer. Just about 4 miles.
“Retired” from teaching tai chi
I started practicing tai chi in 2009 with a beginner course at OLLI (the OSHER Lifelong Learning Institute). I’d always been attracted to tai chi. I liked the way it looked—the slow, controlled movement. I was also interested in it as a martial art, and I liked the idea of “moving meditation.” Despite all that interest, I had not anticipated how transformative the practice would turn out to be.
Before I added the tai chi practice to my life, I was all about figuring out the “right” amount of exercise—and in particular, the minimum amount of running, lifting, walking, bicycling, stretching, etc. to become and remain fit enough to be healthy, comfortable, and capable of doing the things I wanted to be able to do.
Pretty quickly after I took up the practice, I found I was no longer worried about that. I found that my body actually knew what the right amount was, and that all I needed to do was move when I felt like moving—and make sure that my movement was diverse.
Because diversity was the key, I did a lot more than just tai chi. I continued running. I dabbled in parkour. I stepped up my lifting practice (and then shifted to mostly bodyweight training when the pandemic made gyms unavailable, and then continued with it because it seemed to work better). I went down a “natural movement” rabbit hole. I walked a lot.
In about 2012 or 2013 my tai chi instructor asked if anyone wanted to “assistant teach” the beginners class with him. I volunteered, and then did so. After six months or so he asked me to take over the evening class that he was teaching for people who couldn’t come to the early classes. I gradually started filling in for him on other classes as well.
In 2015 I formally took over as the tai chi instructor at the Savoy Rec Center. I really enjoyed teaching tai chi, although I found the constraints (having to show up at every class) a bit. . . constraining.
I did some tweaking around the edges (in particular, combining the Wednesday and Friday classes into a single Thursday class, so I could have a three-day weekend), which helped, but only so much.
Then a few weeks ago, the Rec Center wanted me to sign a new contract which would have required me to buy a new insurance policy, naming the Village of Savoy as an “additional insured.” I’m sure I could have done that—there are companies that sell insurance specifically for martial arts and fitness instructors. But as soon as I got set to research such policies, I realized that I really didn’t want to.
Instead, I wanted to retire.
I’d retired from my regular job years before, in 2007. And of course teaching tai chi four or five hours a week was in no way a career. The first few years I was teaching, I found the money I earned a nice supplement to our other retirement income. But with various improvements to our financial situation over the last few years, the money became pretty irrelevant, and the time constraints more. . . constraining. Especially with my parents facing various health challenges, I want to be able to go visit either one if that seems necessary, which has been difficult if I want to honor my obligation to my students.
So a few weeks ago I told the Rec Center and my students that I was retiring from teaching tai chi. My last classes were yesterday.
I’m sad not to be teaching my students any more, but delighted at losing the set of related constraints.
For years now, my students have been gathering in the park (Morrissey Park in Champaign, Illinois) during nice weather for informal group practice sessions, and I expect we’ll keep doing that. At any rate, I plan to be there, starting in the spring, practicing my tai chi. You are welcome to join us.
2021-11-24 11:56
As I have been saying for years. But the myth that “running will ruin your knees” is pretty tough to get past.
“cartilage is a living tissue that adapts and thrives with regular use”
Source: How to Save Your Knees Without Giving Up Your Workout — NYT
Today’s workout (a medium-ish run, with a bonus hawk)
My workout was a medium-length run of 3.97 miles which I ran in 1:06:45, but that was not my only activity. Besides that, I also hiked a similar-length trail at Homer Lake with Jackie.
The walk was especially nice, and we’re very pleased that (with her new bionic hip) Jackie is once again able to walk reasonable distances. We walked about 2.72 miles in 1:24. There were some very nice views of Homer Lake, as well as some deer, some blue jays, and a handsome snek that I failed to get a decent picture of.
I did get a decent picture of Jackie:
Besides the pictures from Homer Lake, I also got a picture of a handsome Red-tailed Hawk while I was out running, taken quite close to home. (See at the top of this post.) He was still there as I returned home.
I should mention that the run was actually quite a bit longer than my exercise-tracking app gave me credit for. (Google Fit estimates the distance at 4.46 miles.)
You can get an idea of just how much my exercise-tracking app shorted me from this map, if you know that I ran around the lake at the north end of of my run (and not as the map suggests, through it), and that I generally followed roads and paths (without cutting nearly as many corners as the map suggests).
I want to reassure people that I will not be posting all of my workouts going forward. I just wanted to post a representative strength training session and run, so that I’d have then here as examples.