When I don’t exercise and sleep enough, I get either jittery and hyperactive or depressed. (Sometimes I get jittery and hyperactive and depressed, which isn’t any more fun.) This is a self-perpetuating condition, since being either jittery and hyperactive or depressed tends to interfere with my sleep and to make me reluctant to exercise.

So: I am inaugurating a new weekly feature: ’Ow’s Yer ’Elf? On Sunday nights I will make an accounting of the week’s exercise. Those who don’t care can of course skip it. Those who know me personally should feel free to (a) hassle me if the week’s total is uninspiring, and (b) hassle me a lot if I skip posting. (I don’t intend to rely on the hassling to keep me motivated; I’m just hoping that having to make an explicit weekly record will help me keep a more regular schedule.)

In entirely related news, today after some prodding from Olga I went for my first run of the year (I recorded my time). I ran for 50 minutes, covering about 8km,1 in intervals of 5 minutes running and 3 minutes walking. I’ll do this a couple more times then increase the interval ratio (say 5:2); the idea is to keep the total exercise time the same but to increase the proportion that I spend running (and thus the total distance and average speed) rather than to fix the distance and cover it in less and less time. Once I can run continuously for an hour, then I can start working on speed. (It’s a long way off: 5:3 is easy and I bailed on my last interval today.)

So yeah, not a wickedly impressive start, but I’m pretty sure I’ll sleep well tonight.

Notes:

  1. In extremely boring circles because I don’t yet know how far I should go before turning around. [↪]