Tag Archives: healthy living

Updating my profile picture

When you live it, you don’t see it. Maybe you feel it… we are all getting older. I had my photo taken for work recently and realized that I look quite a bit different from my online profile pictures I have been using.

The one on the left is not from too long ago (2018 or 2019), but long enough that I’m no longer that guy. More grey, higher hairline, a few deeper lines. These things are beyond my control.

What is within my control is that I’m fitter than that guy. He had about 15 unwanted pounds on him and yet weighed less than I do now. I’ve lost the unhealthy weight and added muscle.

I can’t stop time, and my face will show my age in the coming decade much more than it did in the past decade. I accept that. But I’m working on being Younger Next Year, and slowing down the ravages of time on my physical and mental health. Part of that is not pretending I’m something that I’m not… so a new profile picture is something I plan to do a bit more frequently than every 3-4 years.

Living on the edge

Today my buddy Dave and I kayaked from Barnet Marine Park to Deep Cove, with a stop for a drink on the rocks of Belcarra Park on the way home.

Zooming out, you can see how close I live (blue dot) to this wonderful escape.

Zoom out a bit more and you can see that the parkland north of me is nothing but vast rainforest all the beyond Whistler, a 1 hour-45 minute drive away.

We literally live on the edge of nature. If you look at the second map shared above, my wife works at an elementary school near the top of Westwood Plateau, and once or twice a year they need to do indoor recess or lunch because of bear sightings.

Today was my 4th day this summer kayaking around here and I realize that I want to own a kayak. To be able to have such a beautiful getaway so close to home is too good not to take full advantage of on a more regular basis. I also want to go on more hikes, and reap the benefits of living on the edge of wilderness. For me, the great outdoors are at my doorstep.

Living a younger life

“Aerobic exercise saves your life, strength training makes it worth living.” ~ Dr. Henry Lodge, ‘Younger Next Year’

A few days ago I wrote,

“It’s my goal that I can be like Gabor, one of the guys on the the Calgary team we trained with. Gabor is 74, healthy, and sharp. I can tell in the short time I met him that he is healthy in body, mind, and spirit. I want my current lifestyle to allow me to get in and play water polo with guys my current age [54] when I’m his age.”

I was intrigued by Gabor. I’ve met 74 year olds that can’t walk without a cane, and who seem weak and unstable, and others who are vibrant and healthy, but not one that can play a tough sport like water polo with people a lot younger than him. So I asked him what his secret was.

“Have you read ‘Younger Next Year‘?” Gabor asked me. “No? You should.”

I’m about 1/2 way through the audiobook. The premise is that anyone over 40 should exercise religiously, 6 days a week. 4 of those days should be dedicated to cardio, using a heart monitor to ensure you are pushing your heart rate above 70% (and sometimes more). The other 2 days should be dedicated to strength training. Do this and you can live vibrantly well into your 80’s.

Our last 1/3 of our life can be active and full of activities we love to do now, feeling young and vibrant. Or we can live a life of slowly feeling older, less agile, and sedentary. A commitment of working out 6 days a week might seem to be a lot, but it’s not and to put it into perspective: We spend 40+ hours a week working to give us the financial means to do what we want… why not put in 6 to 9 hours a week to ensure we can actually do what we want for the next 25-30 years?

It’s time well spent to ensure the time you have left is well lived.

In preparation

How much time do we spend in preparation for something that is coming up? A simple example is a meal, and all the prep work that needs to be done before the meal is made. There is also tidy up time before guests arrive, reading to do before a meeting, personal grooming, and travel time. It occurred to me that we spend a lot of time preparing for events, and in some cases we spend more time in preparation than we do at the actual event we prepared for.

Two thoughts come to mind. First, we ought to find joy in preparation. Cooking is an excellent example of this, it’s not just the consuming of the final product but the joy of getting all the ingredients cut and cooked that we can savour. Can a fun event start for us as we shower and shave, and get ourselves ready? If we are going to spend so much of our lives in preparation for something upcoming, how can we find more joy in this time?

The second thought is about daily exercise. When we aren’t athletes training for, preparing for, an upcoming event, how do we perceive such activity? Exercise is really just preparation for a better tomorrow. It is the accumulation of a healthy lifestyle that pays dividends in the future. It is the preparation for a future life that is more active and vibrant than a sedentary life would promise.

We spend a lot of time in preparation for something else, this preparation time is an opportunity to find joy, to feel accomplishment, and not just a chore to get through on the way to something else. Cooking prep isn’t work, it’s putting love into the food you make for people you care about. Workouts are work, and if done right they are hard, but you can find joy in pushing yourself to new goals, and feel the endorphins a good workout can bring. Life is not about preparation for other things, life is found in the preparation.

Interval Training

The Humbling Lesson

Any regular reader of Daily Ink would know that I’ve been on a health kick since January 2019. After 2-and-a-half years I thought I was in good shape. Well, I just got home from my second morning of playing water polo at Sasamat lake and I realize that I need to reconsider my training regimen. It was humbling playing with players who were mostly between 6 and 20 years older than me and feeling so exhausted so quickly.

The Lesson

My philosophy of 20 minutes of cardio 5-7 times a week has been great. It has proved ‘enough’ insomuch as when I’ve gone on a long hike or bike ride or even a long jog, I’ve been able to keep going as if I trained much more. However water polo and similar games (like basketball) are a different beast. The sprints become anaerobic, the starts and stops are erratic, and the simple cardio I do did nothing to prepare me for a couple days of playing water polo. I was exhausted through the entirety of both practices and now I’m sore in places I forgot I had. 🤣

The Wisdom of Age

A decade ago I would have solved this by trying to add another few workouts in each week. I would have done that for a few weeks, got busy, then fallen off of the training. However, I think I can maintain my current workouts but put some interval training into them. I can go on the bike or treadmill for a few minutes of warmup then do 1 or 2 minute intervals of fast and slow paces, followed by a cooldown. Basically just change what I’m doing rather than how long I’m doing it. And… and this is the important thing, I don’t have to go all-out! I’m just diversifying my fitness level and capabilities.

Lifestyle Health

The focus of my fitness has not been to bulk up. I’m not training for an event. I’m trying to maintain a healthy lifestyle. The lesson I received over the last couple days is that I could adjust my workouts a bit and be more versatile in my overall fitness. I don’t have to go crazy and change things up a lot, I don’t have to put myself in jeopardy of injury by changing my workouts significantly, I can improve my ability to do things like join a Masters team and play water polo, or join a pickup game of basketball, with a much greater chance of doing so injury free.

It’s my goal that I can be like Gabor, one of the guys on the the Calgary team we trained with. Gabor is 74, healthy, and sharp. I can tell in the short time I met him that he is healthy in body, mind, and spirit. I want my current lifestyle to allow me to get in and play water polo with guys my current age when I’m his age. It starts with a commitment to work out regularly, and it seems that it should include a bit of interval training along the way!

———-

Practicing the power play

Ross and I getting a few seconds rest during the scrimmage.

Morning stretch

I’ve never been someone who stretches as much as I should. With all the challenges I’ve had with my back, this has been less than ideal. Recently I’ve started going back to a physiotherapist because my lower back has been aching in a way that I know IMS, intramuscular stimulation, will help. The physiotherapist gave me a set of stretches to do for my hips and hamstrings, and I’ve done them religiously ever since.

The one thing that helped me do these is music. I have a playlist called Enya Stretch and it’s 10 minutes long. I listen to ‘My! My! Time Flies!’ twice, once for each leg, then ‘Only Time’. A former student asked if my stretches looked like this:

https://twitter.com/laefk/status/1555598193622077442?s=21&t=byE0vfyJOu-PZgA2dsNwiA
They look nothing like that, but I find it funny that the song from that commercial is the same ‘Only Time’ from Enya that I listen to when doing some of my stretches. That said, my splits look more like an equilateral triangle than a straight line.

Still, the point isn’t to become Jean-Claude Van Damme flexible, it’s to reduce the ache I feel when I stiffen up, and to reduce the future pain I know that’s in store for me unless I improve my flexibility.

Having a 10 minute playlist really helps. Without it, I’d either rush the stretches, or skip them. Knowing that this is only 10 minutes long makes me realize that I can find the time. The transitions in the songs become queues to let me know that I need to hold a stretch longer and push me to eke a bit more of a stretch out in the last few seconds. And the process feels more like meditation than stretching… which is great because I’ve never really enjoyed stretching.

I finally have a morning stretch routine that I’m sticking to, and I’m sure that future me will be very thankful for the time I’m putting in now to care for my back. Just 10 minutes a day, but hopefully years of flexibility and agility ahead.

Unrealistic expectations

It has been over 2 months since I shot an arrow. No surprise that my session today went a little rough. It was going to be a total bust until I decided to halve my usual distance and start shootings at 10-ish yards rather than my usual 20 yards (18m). Then I was able to relax a bit more and focus on the finer details of my shot rather than trying to hard to shoot well at a longer distance.

I lowered my expectations of what I could do and suddenly I shot better… still not what I used to be able to do, but I could hit the 10-ring consistently enough to relax my focus on the target and pay attention to my shot process. When expectations are too high only disappointment prevails.

I realize now that I need to think of my workouts the same way. Recently, while cleaning out my garage, I spent some time looking back over old photos. These included ones from the Maccabiah Games in Israel back in ’93. I trained the hardest I’ve ever trained and was the fittest I’ve ever been.

Seeing these photos, I looked down at the small donut ring below my belly button and it got me feeling crappy. I was literally thinking over the past few days, “I’ll never look like that again!” And honestly, it was getting me down a bit.

But the archery session has helped me reframe this. I don’t need to be the fittest I’ve ever been at 54, I need to be fit for 54. Big difference. It’s not about having low expectations, no, it’s about not having unrealistic expectations. I’m not going to be 26 fit. I’m not going to shoot a great round in archery after taking more than 2 months off.

I will have fun with my archery and make myself a little better each time. I’m going to keep working out and taking care of my aging body by keeping it fit and healthy… and again, have fun doing it. I’ll set goals for myself, but I won’t set myself up for failure with unrealistic expectations.

Pain tolerance

I’ve always been told I have a high pain tolerance. It stems from years of chronic back pain. Today my back aches. I say ‘aches’ because I break my discomfort into two levels: ache means it’s uncomfortable, and dull; pain means something more sharp and debilitating. Pain means the noise level of the discomfort hinders my thought processes, while I can get numb to the awareness of an ache, even if it is ever-present.

Years ago I was in a moped accident. I was taking a corner at about 55km and hit some gravel. My moped slipped from underneath me and I body surfed across gravel for about 25 to 30 feet, (yes, I’m Canadian and measure speed in km’s and short distances in feet). I’m glad it was an outside curb sending me into the gravel rather than an inside curb launching me into oncoming traffic, but it still sucked.

I needed a bunch of stitches on one knee and a couple more on the other elbow. I also spent over 2 hours having tiny pebbles being removed from my elbows and knees, which took the brunt of my skid. About one and a half hours into this process the head nurse said to me, “You are doing great! We get guys in here twice the size of you that are crying like babies by now.”

My response: “Oh, don’t be mistaken, this %#^*ing hurts!”

And that was the moment that I realized that just like I have my ache/pain scale there are two kinds of pain tolerance, another 2-pronged scale of pain tolerance: There is pain tolerance whereby some people just don’t feel pain like others, versus pain tolerance whereby the person feels pain but is not controlled by the pain despite it hurting a lot/as much as others would feel it. I think this latter variety is where my pain tolerance sits.

Waking up with a back ache isn’t fun. Having to end a conversation with a friend because I can’t sit anymore isn’t fun. Spending time stretching in the morning just so that I can function normally for the rest of the day isn’t fun. But the alternative is pain, and pain really, really isn’t fun… no matter how good my tolerance is.

Easy distraction

I’m finding my phone to be a painfully easy distraction that’s sucking away too much of my time. I need it to write this post. I need it to meditate. I need it to listen to music while I work out. I need it to listen to my book. These are all legitimate reasons to ‘need’ my phone.

I don’t ‘need’ it beyond that, but it still ends up in my hands, it still takes my attention. It still sucks time out of my day.

I’m realizing that I need to put it down more, tuck it away more, leave it alone more.

Less phone, more life beyond the screen.

Over tired

I crashed and burned when I got home yesterday. Just felt wiped out. Slept for a couple hours on the couch and now it’s after midnight and I can’t sleep.

Two more school days, then another week to clean up and prep for next year. Then my holidays begin. Until then, I need to keep a better pattern of sleep.

I’ve done a lot to take care of myself the last few years and sleep needs to be the next thing I figure out. I used to live easily on 5-6 hours sleep but I need more now, and I’m not getting it. I need to figure out a sleep pattern that is healthy and works for me. And that should start with me not looking at my screen so late… and on that note, it’s time to get some shut-eye!