Chris Dwan

Tag: exercise

  • Productive!

    Good day. Before I forget it, click here for the Jedi answer to Brokeback Mountain, courtesy of jrtom.

    Woke up and went to morning Pilates workout with redmed. It was a good time, except for the “you’re hurting yourself” pain on the leg lifts. Either I was doing them wrong, or I’ve never worked that muscle / tendon in my entire life. Either way, I bailed on those exercises.

    Then we came home, and I took down the holiday lights and then went in the crawl space under the bedroom to put down plastic sheeting (against moisture) and install insulation (against cold). For the insulation, I used this spray crap called Great Stuff. This crap is amazing. You put the little nozzle into a gap in your foundation / wall / whatever and fill it with foam. The foam adheres to anything (masonry, wood, metal, ceramic, flesh) and expands like crazy. It’s also this awful yellowish color.

    While down there I looked around and saw that there was one corner where the cobwebs were blowing and billowing in an icy breeze. I found the source, Great Stuff’ed it, and the breeze stopped. It could be my imagination, but the bedroom floor feels warmer already to me.

    Then I continued the document apocalypse. More shredding, more destroying. Stumbled onto a cache of letters from my girlfriend from High School. They passed the “do I feel even a twinge of a desire to hang on to these” test, so they lived. The corporate credit card statements from eight years ago were not so lucky. I removed another three big filing boxes from my life. Go me. Less to move, less to care if it gets ruined.

    Went to a work party for redmed‘s job this evening. More rich food, too much wine, and guarded conversation. More wearing a tie. It was fun and all, but I need to either build social connections with these people outside of these formal events, or stop liking them.

  • Bethesda

    Color me surprised, Bethesda doesn’t suck nearly as much as I remember it sucking! There’s a Rock Bottom brewery around the corner from my hotel, plus six or seven really yummy smelling Thai and Vietnamese restaurants. Plus, the streets are populated with semi-drunken 30-year-old fratboys. This means that it’s totally safe out there, as long as I present a less appealing target for molestation than a drunken fratboy. I had the Barley Wine, which was remarkably similar to the one I made. Stopped at one, lest I become one of the herd. Also, crabcakes. Can’t come to MD and fail to get the crabcakes.

    Class today was fun. My colleague taught, and he’s entertaining. He kept saying things like “fundamentally, computers are boring unless they’re doing something cool for someone smart” and “grid computing is mostly hysterical lies backed up by misleading press releases.” I hope to be so inspiring for my bit tomorrow.

    Excitement is in the air: I ordered two beer kits (plus a new bottling wand and a new capper to replace the ones that finally crapped out). We’re making cherry stout and the “tongue splitter” west coast ale. After the kits arrive (supposedly the 9th, according to UPS) all are welcome to a day of wort boiling debauchery!

    As part of my “not really a resolution, but it seems like a good idea to try to stay in good shape” for the new years, I busted out the Navy Seals Workout DVD. I have fallen far. I had that damn thing well in hand. Now I struggled to even get through each section doing some of the exercises from each set, much less keep up. I am, to put it lightly, quite sore.

    I will return to peak form. I’m not going to get in shape only to let it slip away. Dogs of maniacal working out, to me!

    Oh yeah, looks like I get to be an author again, provided that I can slap about 40 pages of well intentioned but poorly worded text into a presentable form in the next week. Hooray for collaborators who see that I can write and that I know the topic and are all like “this is way behind schedule, wanna fix it and be my co-author?”

  • Sparring

    Tonight was the first sparring night we’ve had at the gym in a while. My second time ever. Apparently, right before I joined the gym it had gotten pretty ugly in the sparring department, with emergency room level injuries every week. So my teacher called it off for a year or so. Now we’re getting back into it.

    (1) Teacher puts on this padded armor suit, and we get to hit him as hard as we want. Good times.
    (2) Sparred a 14 year old girl. Felt vaguely guilty, being both bigger and faster than her.
    (3) Sparred a 50 year old policeman. He’s solid, stay the hell out of the way of those hands and feet … but I could handle him if needed.
    (4) Sparred a 24 year old firefighter, third degree black belt, who drives in demolition derbies for fun (yes, technolope and capital_l, it was the guy who got back in the flipped car at the derby). Jesus Christ I’m gonna have bruises, and I could tell he was going easy on me.

    Overall, I live.

  • Ironman

    Ouch.

    That said, I succeeded. Today I rode the Minnesota Ironman, and (so far) have lived to tell about it. It’s just a bike ride (not the other kind of ironman, which usually involves swimming and some other athletic activity). The “ironman” bit comes from the fact that the weather at this time of year in Minnesota is highly variable, and the stated cancellation policy is “never, never, never.” Today, we had rain in the morning and strong winds in the afternoon. A few years back, apparently, there was hail. In 1988, it snowed a metric buttload (to borrow from capital_l).

    There are three options for length of ride: 30, 62, or 100 miles. I decided to do the 62 because it’s about twice what I’ve ever ridden in a single sitting before. From time to time, I will take a weekend morning and ride from my house (in Saint Paul, by the Fairground) over to Uptown Minneapolis, around a lake or two, and back. That’s about 30. In preparation for today’s ride, I did that two weeks ago and was *not* emotionally prepared to turn around and do it again. In between, there has been little time for distance training. So why not? 62 miles. Here we go.

    Here’s the blow-by-blow:

  • Pull ups, by God…

    Just wanted to mention that I ripped off 32 pull ups at the gym today. Sets of 5, alternating between close grip, wide grip, behind the neck, and chin ups. Around 20, I started thinking “what the hell? All this working out is paying off?”

    Rock on, Navy Seals.

  • Am I a plant?

    Well clearly no, I’m not a plant. They have cool superpowers like being able to clone themselves by breaking off a chunk (a “stem” cell, so to speak).

    However the sunshine does make me really happy. It’s late March and we’re finally rid of most of the snow. The awesome snowpiles in the mall parking lots and the vacant lots downtown will be there until April. With the exception of some small snow-curbs left on the northern sides of buildings, we’re into the season of mud. It’s also rapidly becoming the season of exposed flesh around the University. Distracting, after an eight month period where the goal was to cover all exposed flesh. Hello? I’d like my brain back, please…

    In any event, it’s bicycle season.

    I love to bike to work. For one thing, it helps to average out my karma from the whole SUV-driving issue. For another thing, I get a buffer of physical exercise on either side of my sometimes stressful job. It also helps to isolate home-life from work-life, which is much needed, especially with the laptop and the wireless at home. It’s become far too easy to burn a couple of hours in the evening working on things I could do better, faster, and more profitably at work.

    For the record, screaming “faggot” out the rolled down window of your car as you buzz me is not going to change the way I live my life one damn bit. I realize that this gives a lot of credit to the faggot-screamer. I assume that they are trying to communicate, which is probably not the case. They probably just want to scream “faggot” for whatever reason. Cool for them, weird for me. On the off chance that one of those people can read (big assumption), and that they choose to read my livejournal (bigger assumption), here’s your clue: I hope it makes you happy, because it affects me not at all.