I’m having pretty good success with my new daily routine.
Things haven’t gone perfectly. One day last week I was coming down with a virus and took a sick day—no fiction writing got done. Yesterday’s bitter cold kept me from getting out to exercise—no walking, no lifting, and no taiji.
Today, things went pretty much according to plan. I had breakfast at 6:30, got to work at 7:00, and wrote until 8:30. Then I bundled up (still pretty darned cold) and walked to the Fitness Center, where I did my usual lifting and stretching, followed by about 25 minutes of qigong and taiji. I deviated from my schedule a bit, having an early lunch before getting back to fiction writing, but I did do two 90-minute sessions, which were both reasonably productive.
The novel’s word count has actually been soaring, because I’ve been slotting back in bits and pieces that I’d pulled out in a previous restructuring effort, now that I’ve got a better idea where they go. I’ve just about finished that phase, and it is almost time to settle in for the next major phase of writing new prose. (Which I’m all excited about, because that’s the fun part.)
One reason I haven’t been more productive these past two years is that I’ve let my fitness activities consume the morning hours that are my prime writing time. I know that, and I want to free that time up for writing, but I’m loath to give up my taiji, because of the way it has been almost miraculous in changing my body for the better.
Five years ago I was starting to feel old. I could still do all the ordinary stuff I needed to do every day, but my spare capacity was shrinking. My balance and flexibility and strength and endurance were all less than they had been—and only just barely good enough. Any unusual stress, such as carrying something heavy up or down stairs, or moving across rough or shifting terrain, seemed dangerous. I had trouble getting a full night’s sleep, because my back would ache after lying still for a few hours.
Taiji (together with lifting) turned that completely around. I feel better than I’ve felt in years. I really don’t want to give that up.
The problem is, I’ve been devoting a huge chunk of each morning to the lifting and the taiji class, and morning is by far my most productive time to write.
Fortunately, I think I’ve figured out a way to deal with that. The key—and I’ve known this for a long time—is to start my writing first. Once I’ve had a solid writing session, taking a break for some exercise is perfect. After that, I can get back to writing. (Whereas I’ve found it very hard to start writing after a long morning of exercise.)
The way we’d been doing it, we’d do our lifting before taiji. We briefly experimented with doing the lifting after taiji, but I found that hurt my knees. (My theory is that the taiji tired out the small muscles that stabilize my knees, making them just a little too wobbly for heavy lifting.) This has been great for actually doing the lifting, but has meant an awfully early start to the day—too early to fit in writing first.
So, during the last week of December and the first two weeks of January, while the taiji class is on break, I’m experimenting with a new daily routine. I’m still tweaking it, but as currently sketched out, it looks like this:
At 7:00, right after breakfast, I sit down to write fiction, and work for 90 minutes.
At 8:30 I take a break and spend the hour from 9:00 to 10:00 engaging in some fitness activity: lifting or taiji. (Once the class resumes, I’ll do the class on days that it meets, and lift on the other days.)
Back home by 10:30, I write fiction for another 90 minutes, then break for lunch at noon.
After lunch I get back outside and walk again. Lately I’ve been using this time to play Ingress, but in the summer I may just walk, go for a run, or whatever.
In the mid-to-late afternoon, I may do a bit more work on some writing-related activity: Writing non-fiction (such as a Wise Bread post), revising stories, submitting stuff to editors, critiquing work for the Incognitos, etc.
I’m trying to be a bit more careful about social media, because of how easy it is to fritter away a whole morning reading stuff my friends have found interesting, without abandoning it. Right now I’m checking social media briefly before breakfast, then staying away from it until after lunch, then pretty much allowing unlimited checking in the afternoons.
I’ve been doing this for more than a week now (with the modification that on Saturday and Sunday I just do one fiction-writing session, rather than two). It’s going great so far—I’ve gotten several thousand words written on my novel.
I’ll keep you posted.
[The core of this post was originally written as part of my year-end summary of my writing. However, not being about my writing in 2013, it didn’t belong there, so I’ve pulled it out and made it a post of its own.]
I’ve been practicing taiji for more than 4 years now. Jackie and I started with a 16-week class at OLLI, after which we continued studying with the same teacher, Mike Reed, at the Savoy Recreation center.
Me teaching the summer Park District class. Photo by Steven D. Brewer, used with permission.
The OLLI class taught an 8-movement form, the same form I taught my students when I taught a taiji class for the Champaign Park District this summer. We continued to do that form in the Savoy Rec classes, but also started learning a form that consisted of the first 12 of the Chen 48-movement form. Fairly early on, Mike proceeded to teach us the second 12 movements, so that we had a 24-movement form.
We stuck with that 24-movement form for a long time—I think we went most of a year without adding any new movements.
Jackie and I and a couple of other students bugged Mike about adding more movements, but he resisted. I think I now understand the reasons. The first 24 movements are pretty easy to do. That is, learning the whole sequence takes a while, and doing them exactly right may be difficult, but no individual piece of any of the movements is physically very challenging. Starting early in the second half of the 48, there are a number of movements that are considerably more challenging: Hops, jumps, kicks, and pivots—sometimes in combinations—that Mike hesitated to try to teach to a class where I’m the youngest guy there.
Eventually, after maybe a year, we wore him down. A year and a half ago, we got through the third 12 movements (somewhat modified, to reduce the aggressiveness of some of the jump-kicks and hopping pivots). This fall, we’ve learned the final 12 movements, doing the last two last week.
Today, for the first time, we did the whole 48-movement form from beginning to end.
I still have a lot to learn, even about the first movements—and, of course, I barely know the last few. But that’s okay. One of the first things I learned in taiji—that I should have learned from my previous studies of martial arts, but somehow didn’t—is that taiji isn’t something that you learn: it’s something that you do.
Now I can do a bit more. That’s all. And yet, it’s kind of a big deal to me.
For about six weeks now, I’ve been playing Ingress.
It’s a game. You could almost call it a video game—you see what’s happening on a video screen—but to play you have to go outside: The action of the game happens at specific places in the real world.
The conceit of the game is that matter from another dimension is intruding into our world via portals. In our world, these portals appear as works of public art or unique architecture. Via the game (running on an Android phone or tablet), you can locate and manipulate these portals.
I’ve been having a great time. I’m working with a half-dozen or so local Resistance players, some new like me, others already at level 8 and mainly providing support (since they’re no longer working to level up themselves).
The structure of the game encourages team play—building a powerful portal requires multiple high-level players to work together. But the team play doesn’t need to be simultaneous, just somewhat coordinated. Lower-level players can make faster progress if they play with a higher-level player, but it’s not necessary.
Besides the pleasures of loosely integrated, minimal-pressure teamwork, the other great thing about the game is that, because it takes place in the real world, to play it you have to go out in the real world. The game reports on how far you’ve walked in the course of playing it—for me, 50 km in the past six weeks. (See “Distance walked” in screenshot.) I credit that walking with helping me maintain my weight even though I haven’t been able to run for the past month.
I’m also really into the public art aspect of the game. I was already a huge fan of public art, but the game has made me connect with individual works in a way that I hadn’t. I’m aware of individual pieces in a whole new way—how they relate in space with one another and with other aspects of the community. (Although it is a different experience now to go for a walk downtown. Even when I’m not playing, I’m aware that certain works that are portals in the game. I have to remember that most people are not.)
Anyway, Ingress is now in open beta. If you have an Android device, you can just download the game and go.
I recommend it.
If you’re local and play, get in touch. I’d be glad to help you level up.
I hurt my ankle last month, and had to quit running.
There was no injury event. In late September I had two weeks of very modest running and fairly modest walking—and then one night (after a rest day!) turning over in bed made my ankle hurt bad enough that it woke me up.
It didn’t seem bad. I quit running and waited for it to get better. Except it turned out to be easily reinjured. (It seemed especially prone to reinjury related to bus riding. Three different times I hurt it that way—once running to catch a bus, once stepping down from the bus and landing hard on that foot, and once just stepping up into the bus pushing off with that foot.)
After about three weeks, I began to think that maybe it was a stress fraction or some other injury that might need more than just rest to get better. (Spoiler alert: It wasn’t, and it didn’t.)
I went to see my doctor, who ordered x-rays and a podiatry consult. The podiatrist I saw was an orthopedic surgeon, who had quit doing surgery to do this instead.
According to my orthopedic surgeon/podiatrist, there was no sign of a stress fracture—but it almost didn’t matter anyway, because stress fractures of the ankle and leg (except at the head of the femur) very rarely dislocate. The treatment for almost any injury of this sort is just to rest it until it gets better.
My formal diagnosis was peroneal tendonitis.
My ankle seems to finally be about all better. Yesterday I (once again) carelessly ran for the bus—and this time it didn’t hurt! However, Jackie has several tasks for me to accomplish over the next few days, and doesn’t want me to be unable to accomplish them because I’m hobbling around. So I’ve agreed to hold off on running for one more week.
My orthopedic surgeon/podiatrist is also a runner, and he sounds just like a runner. Jackie asked if my having switched to minimalist shoes the previous summer might have put me at more risk for injury. The doctor didn’t seem to think so, and mentioned that he had started wearing five-finger shoes for his short training runs. He had liked them well enough, that when it came time for his half-marathon, he’d abruptly decided to wear them for the race, even though he hadn’t been wearing them for his long training runs. Said it worked out fine for him.
I expect the same will be true of me. I’ll resolve to be more careful about adding distance next year, but I doubt if my resolution will make much difference. Long runs feel too good.
As Steven says, “Running is great exercise between injures.”
My only real hope is to do a better job of maintaining a base level of fitness over the winter, and I have a plan for doing so.
Jackie’s Spinners and Weavers guild had an event at Forest Glen today. It’s an annual event called Dye Day, where they mix up half a dozen pots with natural dyes and all the members can bring in some fiber to dye with walnut husks or goldenrod or cochineal or indigo or whatever.
Because we were going to be at Forest Glen, I seized the opportunity to go for a trail run.
It was a great run. I ran a section of the same backpacking trail Jackie and I had walked back in July, beginning at the same point (near the Gannett Center). My plan was to run out on the trail for 30 minutes, then turn around and run back. That was probably a bit ambitious, given that it’s my first trail run of the year, and that I’ve only had about three runs so far this summer that hit the 60 minute mark, but I was pretty sure it was doable, and that as long as I didn’t try to hurry, I’d probably be fine.
And, in fact, I was.
I saw two deer—or very possibly the same deer twice. At any rate, he looked very annoyed when, having run off after catching sight of me, I came at him from another direction when my trail took me around behind a hill and then right up to the very spot where he’d run off to.
I also saw a stufflebeam, who galumphed at a reasonably high rate of speed back into the underbrush when I threatened to get between him and that safety.
But the best thing I saw was a large flock of turkey vultures, that were all roosting together in a big tree that overhangs the trail.
Turkey vulture feather
Like the deer and the stufflebeam, the vultures were not happy to have a runner come upon them suddenly. As I passed under their tree, first one and then another leapt from their branch and took off into the air, beating their wings with a power that isn’t so apparent when they’re soaring.
But there weren’t just two or three vultures. As I slowed, startled by the first birds’ explosive launches, they continued taking flight, no longer one at a time, now taking flight in groups of two or three at a time. At least twenty very large birds took off from that tree in the 5 or 10 seconds it took me to pass under it.
It was spectacular.
It was early enough in my run that I didn’t want to stop and gawk, even to see the birds climb into the air to join their fellows who were already soaring, although I enjoyed what I could see of it.
It was hard to beat that little adventure, although the deer and Mr. Stufflebeam did their best, as did the forest scenery and the trail itself.
The backpacking trail is only marked to be followed in the forward direction, so it’s easy to get off track if you try to follow it in reverse, and I did go off course for a bit as I tried to return. After a few minutes of bushwhacking I saw where I’d gone wrong and worked back just enough to get back on track.
Running the trail as an out-and-back meant that I passed once again under the vulture-roosting tree—and it turned out that quite a few vultures had decided that 9:00 AM was too early to be up soaring, and had returned to roost some more. Once again, they launched themselves into the air. This time I slowed down to watch, and finally stopped near the trunk of the tree.
One vulture, either lazier or more confident of his safety up on a branch maybe 20 feet above the trail, decided not to bother taking off, giving me a good look at his red head and vulturous posture.
Roughly under him, I found the feather pictured above, which I assume based on its location and size is a turkey vulture feather. From the shape, I’m assuming it’s a primary flight feather (although I don’t know my feather morphology as well as all that).
I picked it up and carried it a short distance to a sunny spot where I could get a good photo with my phone. (I hadn’t brought my good camera.)
From there it was less than a mile back to the trail head.
According to my GPS thingy, I ran 4.523 miles in 1:14:44, giving me a 16:39 pace. My old GPS thingy—a first generation Timex Bodylink—isn’t nearly as good as a modern GPS device, and tends to have trouble maintaining a satellite lock under a forest canopy, so it doesn’t get as many waypoints as it might. That tends to cheat me out of credit for my full mileage. (The device assumes that I’ve run a straight line between one fix and the next. When the device fails to get a lock for many seconds at a time, it treats my run as cutting a straight line, even though I was following a twisty path.) Still, 4.523 miles is the best number I’ve got, so that’s what I’m going with.
I headed back to the Spinners and Weaver’s guild event, got out my folding chair, and sat down to rehydrate. Turkey vultures—almost certainly the same ones I’d startled into the air—were circling overhead. One of Jackie’s guildmates turned to me and said, “I guess they’ve figured out we’re dying down here.”
Great to be out on the trails again. I will have to find a way to run more trails before the end of the season.
Jackie and I did another of our very long walks yesterday, going 18.25 miles. We hope to go even farther in a walk in a couple of weeks (we’re tentatively thinking 20 miles), but that will probably be the last time this year that we do a new longest walk ever, simply due to limited daylight as the year winds down.
Like the last couple of very long walks, we stuck with Milo’s as our lunch destination. If you go the shortest way possible, it’s about 14 miles there and back. We were aiming for a bit over 17, so we had to add some short side trips to get the length up. We went by way of the research park and had coffee at the iHotel, went through Meadowbrook Park, and then after lunch briefly visited Crystal Lake Park as well.
I’ve brought my camera on almost all of these walks, but have hardly taken any pictures. This time, I took some pictures.
We’d walked through Meadowbrook Park on a couple of our previous walks, but usually after lunch. This time we did Meadowbrook Park before lunch—and we walked the prairie path, rather than taking the paved paths through the sculpture garden.
It was fun to see Jackie through the big bluestem.
Jackie in the prairie at Meadowbrook Park
I was also pretty pleased with this picture of a thistle flower, taken just a few yards further down the path.
Thistle flower in the prairie at Meadowbrook Park
After lunch we proceeded toward Urbana, passing through the neighborhood where Jackie used to live before we started dating. One feature of that neighborhood is a little Japanese Garden. Jackie and I used to visit it pretty often. Eventually the last couple of reasons to visit that neighborhood vanished, and we quit going. I was pleased to get there again, although a little sad to see that they’d given up on the water features, and instead filled the pools with gravel. It’s not the same.
The red bridge at the Japanese Garden near Sunnycrest
We also did a preposterous thing. In the midst of our very long walk, we paused to walk the labyrinth in Crystal Lake Park. (Endomondo did not seem to give us credit for this extra walking. I suppose at the level of precision possible with GPS, someone walking a labyrinth looks an awful lot like someone sitting at a bench.)
Jackie walking the labyrinth at Crystal Lake Park
For those who are interested in such things, here’s the data on our walk, via Endomondo:
I got a great comment on my previous post (thanks Ilana!), and started to reply in a comment there, but realized that I was straying into something that I wanted to talk in a post—training cycles that aren’t a multiple of 7 days.
Rereading my post, I see that it does look like my only runs are my long run and my fast run. That’s not the case, though. I try to include two or three easy runs each week as well.
In years past, my training schedule was pretty ordinary. Each week would include a long run and a fast run, each followed by a rest day. The other three days would each be a chance for an easy run. I found that I could just about maintain my fitness if I ran three times a week, but that I had to run four or five times a week if I wanted to improve either my speed or my endurance.
This summer my training routine has been complexificated by these very long walks I’ve been doing. It turns out that I need about two days to recover from a walk that pushes beyond the farthest I’ve ever walked before. Adding a long walk and one or two recovery days to my usual schedule pushes it out to a 9 or 10 day cycle, instead of a 7-day cycle.
The obvious thing to do would be to create a 9-day cycle—something like this: long walk, rest day, easy run, easy run, long run, rest day, easy run, fast run, rest day. One obstacle to that is that the various tracking tools I’m aware of all provide summaries for weekly periods, not for 9-dayly periods. (If you know of an exercise tracking tool that can produce useful summaries for training cycles of arbitrary length, let me know.)
So, I’m just winging it as far as a training schedule goes. Since it became clear that we wouldn’t get to Kalamazoo for the Kal-Haven trail walk this summer (we’re now hoping to do it next summer), we’ve eased up a bit on lengthening our very long walks, although we’re still planning to do 17 miles shortly. At these distances, it seems like doing each “even longer” walk ought to happen only every other week (with the long walk on the alternate weeks being comfortably within our established capability).
Last week I got out for a long run. At 5.14 miles, I exactly matched the distance of my previous longest run of the year. (I ran the same route.) I also just about matched the time, running it in 1:07:04 versus 1:07:50 back in June (a 13:03 pace, versus a 13:12 pace).
At this point, I’m pretty happy with the duration of my long run. I want to be able to run for an hour, and I can now do that. Running for an hour makes me feel great. I like to attribute this to endocannabinoid production, although I don’t actually have any evidence for that. Whatever the cause, running that long makes me feel good in a way that running for 20 minutes doesn’t.
At this point, I don’t see much reason to ramp up the distance further. It might be that running even further would make me feel even better, but I hesitate to risk finding out. Where would it end? More particularly, would it end before my body broke down from the stress of running ever-longer runs?
On the other hand, I’d like to run a bit faster. In particular, I’d like to be able to run 6 miles in the hypothetical one-hour run that makes me feel so good.
To see whether I was in striking distance of that, I went out for a fast run yesterday, doing what I call a tempo run. (I run a tempo run simply by running a comfortable distance—the same as I might run for an easy run—but running pretty hard.) I ran my Kaufman Lake loop, which is 1.5 miles, and I did it in 14:12 for a 9:36 pace.
So that’s pretty promising. I can run the duration I want to run and I can run the speed I want to run. Now it’s just a matter of closing the gap—getting fit enough to run that speed for the whole distance.
I think that’s doable. Today I did my usual easy run of 2.2 miles, but I ran just a little faster than I’ve been lately, setting a 10:43 pace.
In fact, I don’t think I even need much of a plan. I’ll just go on doing a long run of about an hour every week or two, picking up the pace a bit as it feels comfortable to do so. And I’ll try to fit in a fast run every week, letting the distance creep up a bit as it seems like my fitness supports it.
With any luck I’ll be running an hour at a 10-minute-per-mile pace before the snow flies.
This is just a quick post to note that my calf injury seems to have healed completely.
Last week I did two test runs—a 0.5 mile run with no turns, followed (after a rest day, to see if I had any delayed pain or swelling) by a 0.63 mile run with some turns.
When neither of those caused any problems, I went out later in the week and did my usual early-season short run of 1.5 miles.
Over the weekend, Jackie and I hiked nearly 6 miles at Fox Ridge, a state park about 60 miles from here. It’s another place where there’s elevation change available, and a set of trails to take advantage of it.
I took a rest day after the hike (having learned that lesson), and went out this morning for a 2.15 mile run, my usual mid-season short run.
All went well. No pain, no soreness, no swelling. There’s no tender spot in my calf when I poke at it.
I’ll take it quite easy as I ramp up speed and distance going forward, but I’m declaring the injury officially healed.
