lazy shit

I took a day off from stair work today, deliberately deciding to revert to an old habit: just sleeping in. I felt a bit guilty, but I also felt pretty good when I got up late. A lot of fitness experts say you shouldn't train every single day, anyway: it's the down time during which your muscles repair and rejuvenate themselves. That said, during January when I was doing my 30-day project, I was avid to get my cardio back up to some semblance of strength, so I don't regret doing the stairs every single day during that period. For most of February and the beginning of March, I was doing the stairs every day, but my schedule was 1.25 staircases MWF, then half-staircases on all the other days—just enough to get me heaving. A half-staircase isn't really that much actual exercise: it's no more than five minutes. 1.25 staircases is close to 20-25 minutes of gasping and heaving, including during my rest period as I wait for the elevator to take me back down to B1. (That rest period, which I think I'd said was about a minute, is actually more like two minutes.)

What prompted today's break was how tired I felt yesterday, during the day, after I'd done my 1.25 staircases in the early morning. I was noticing how tiring it was, as I got to work, to climb up to the second floor of my building, where my office is. I'm kind of thinking that I might skip the staircase work outright on Tuesdays and Thursdays in favor of just distance walking (about which I've been shamefully inconsistent). One thing that won't change is the whole getting-up-early thing. I'm still not a morning person, and my body is still rebelling against this schedule (it works when I'm on vacation, but not when I'm back at my job), but I sense that there might be something to this whole early to bed, early to rise business. I do know that doing the staircase in the early morning means it's less likely that I'll encounter random people in the stairwell. When I used to do the staircase at night, there was always a chance that someone would be using the stairwell as their own smoking room, or there might be a student sitting at the window and studying, or someone might be descending from one floor to another, or some tween girl might be in the staircase, crying about something (with all the echoing, the stairwell is a terrible place to cry). I also felt bad about the noise I made as I climbed the stairs: the thud of my steps, the gasping, the whole horror-movie effect of my approach. I know for a fact that I've heard people above me get intimidated by my approach: I've heard them get up and exit through the fire door just to avoid me. Feeling's mutual.

Anyway, I indulged in a one-day break today, but this might become the new normal. One reason why I haven't skipped days before now is that I've worried about detraining, which can happen pretty fast. If I'm off-program for even as little as two or three days, then get back on-program, I can tell that I've started to get rusty. But if I'm off for only a single day, will that affect my MWF performance? Everyone is different in this regard; some people can go years away from a routine, then get back into it and be at full speed within a week. Others, like me, lose everything, going back to Square One, which leads me back to my insight that fitness is a hamster wheel that you can never leave.

My resting heart rate has gone down from all the staircase work, but I haven't checked my blood pressure or blood sugar in a while. I imagine those haven't improved much. I'm going to have to radically alter my current diet, which I've let slip back into carbiness. My weight, which I just checked this morning, hasn't moved up or down, and it's currently too high—another sign that the diet must change.

Much to do, much to do.