Fitness For One Month

For the month of May, we are engrossed in a fitness scheme: to work out every weekday, have one juiced drink for a meal replacement, and get outdoors for physically-demanding activities on weekends. Simple plan, right? Well, not exactly.

Our workout is mostly cardio and endurance, using the Insanity workout videos (BeachBody). For my build, I am in my target weight so the workouts are mostly for maintenance. We've done well for a week thus far.  That is, until I find myself in a familiar hard place: these demanding workouts require increased servings of proteins and carbohydrates, which we did not quite plan for properly. As someone once told me, you cannot workout on salads. A nutrition adjustment is badly needed to make this work.

The meal we chose to juice is breakfast, perhaps not the best idea. As the most important meal of the day, it is now apparent that juicing does not provide the energy needed for the day. Added to the fact that I wake up at 3am and study/work, then do a full course of "Insanity", and then put in a demanding 9-hour day at work, it is no wonder I'm drained by the time I get home in the evening. We probably need to keep a full breakfast and juice some other meal. Or if we keep breakfast, it ought to provide the zing needed to carry through the day. Whenever we get our juicing book back (The Everything Juicing Book), we'll make more elaborate and targeted juices.

The weekends are for outdoor activities. Last weekend, I was out biking for 5 hours on Saturday morning. By the time I returned home, I had a great appreciation for the week-old workout we've been doing. It was exhausting but manageable because of the endurance from the workouts (at least compared with the last time I was on that trail). The upcoming weekends will see us hiking, doing the incline, and some indoor rock climbing.

Along the way, we are keeping track of the tangible benefits: how much weight we lose, how much further we can go physically, how expensive juicing is (or not), and how we can better incorporate the good ideas into our normal lifestyle beyond the life of this project. Especially remaining fit and more healthy nutrition, tailored for our particular lifestyle.

6-Week Programming Marathon

Now in the sixth month of development, I'd like to see my latest big project LeafCompass.com wrapped up the sooner the better. It is beginning to feel like I have been at it too long, that I need a fresh and new pursuit. My wild target to complete all contractual obligations by September 30 does not seem too far-fetched, but it will require a lot of effort, drive, and commitment. With those at hand, I am ready to enter what I call a "programming marathon" - where I pour everything I have into software development in order to churn out more features in the shortest possible time.

The next 6 weeks will not be fun - especially for my wife. Whenever I've had such marathons, she's observed that I get too consumed with the projects and leave nothing for her and the marriage (and rightly so). So I am treading carefully this time, both to make sure I am fully present at home and to lay a framework for how I will handle future marathons, if needed, without letting the marriage dynamic suffer. I'm all about experimentation to learn new ways of doing things.

So what actually happens during these marathons? Programming a ton. Little sleep. Junk food. All-nighters. No social life. No exercise. No TV shows. No drum practice. Background music all the time. Coffee. Heavily-chalked blackboard with visualizations of various ideas. Odd sleep hours. Any moment you don't have to be anywhere else, you spend working on the program. Non-stop. It's not fun, but I always get a ton of work done. This little habit saw me through college. I'm one of those guys that could do two all-nighters before the final exam and still pass the class having not attended most of it throughout the semester. In six weeks, we'll know whether I still got the mojo.