Just Doing It

Some times I jog home from work.

Jogging home is easier than jogging to work. I'm sure this is partly because it's mostly level or downhill going home, but I rather suspect this isn't the only reason.

I do a little pre-planning for this. I leave my backpack and purse at home for the days I'm thinking of jogging home, because they're a pain to carry if I'm jogging. Sometimes I don't run even though I'm prepared for it, and I don't jog two days in a row because jogging's hard on the knees and it's good to give them some recovery time. Especially if you're running on pavement, which I am.

Some days, it's hard for me to tell the difference between my pre-exercise self of two years ago, and myself today. My weight hasn't changed much, and though I dropped a size in clothing, to my own eyes I still look the same. It's not so much that exercise hasn't made a difference as that I'm eating more now, so it nets out.

But there are changes.

The first time I tried to jog home from work, I did it in a handful of short bursts interspersed with walking. I couldn't do a sustained jog, not even for a quarter of a mile. I'd jog for perhaps ninety seconds at a time.

On Thursday, I ran home, stopping only for the traffic light. As I trotted down the hill to my house, I thought about how easy it was to jog half a mile or even a mile now. A mile and a half was still tough, but I could go a mile without my legs even complaining. It's not fun, but it is easy.

So I ran past my house, because it's only eight or nine minutes to run home from work and that's not much of a workout, and as long as I've started I might as well get a solid twenty minutes in.

Usually when I go jogging from home, I start by doing the steep hill north of my house, because I want to get it over with while I'm still fresh. It was too late for me to tackle it while I was fresh, so I went 'round the back route, which is a shallower grade but goes on longer and generally annoys me more to go up. I wasn't sure how far I'd make it before giving out.

To my surprise, I made it all the way to the top of the grade, a little more than halfway through the loop. At which point I thought, It's all downhill from here, might as well jog the rest of the way home, too.

Which would be about 1.8 or 1.9 miles, total, more than the 1.5 that'd been the most I'd ever managed before. But I did it, one foot in front of the other, not trying for speed, just keeping to a slow jog. I didn't think about where I was going or how much longer I'd go on for. I'm just doing it, I thought. Just doing it.

As I neared my house, I decide to do it a little longer, and get to a nice even two miles. And then I did it.

The first time I ever jogged a full mile, I was 16.

The second time I did it, I was 36.

The first time I jogged two miles, I was 36, too.

I'm not much of a runner; telnar can walk faster than I can jog, without even trying. I don't like running, particularly; it's just one way to get from point A to point B, and since I have to get to and from work anyway I might as well run it occassionally. I doubt I'll ever be a marthon runner: it's boring.

But maybe someday I'll make it to three miles.

Tranquilized

It's Saturday afternoon, and I don't much feel like doing anything.

For the last few months, I've devoted a largish portion of my free time to bard_bloom's Terrible Butterflies game. It's been comparatively quiet the last week (meaning a mere 250 new messages, as opposed to the more usual 600-700 -- it might be premature to forecast its end). In some of the previous quiet periods, I found other stuff for my character to do. Lately, I'm more inclined to let the PBEM be somewhat quiet, and find other things to do.

Which means I have to remember what other things I used to do.

Let's see:

• Exercise: I've still been doing that


• Post to my personal LJ: haven't done much of that


• Read my friends list: current on it now


• Draw: have done a bit of that, granted mostly for the aforementioned Terrible Butterflies


• Post to unfinishedtales: haven't done that since the PBEM started


• Call koogrr: still doing that regularly


• Hang out with Lut: still doing that


• Run logs for Game of October: remarkably, still doing this


• Play Puzzle Pirates: hadn't played since January and let my subscription lapse in March, more because I couldn't motivate myself to give them my Visa's new expiration date than out of any active desire to cancel. I actually like Three Rings and don't mind paying them for making and supporting a good game, even if I'm not playing it. When was the last time you heard someone who felt that way about Blizzard or Sony?

Of all of these things, the only one I didn't miss doing (or at least "having done") was Puzzle Pirates.

So, naturally, this week I started playing Puzzle Pirates again.

No, I'm not exactly sure how that works, either.

Of course, there's a big difference between wanting to do something, and wanting to have done something. Art and writing are two things that I'm always happy to have done, but not always interested in the actual doing them part. At times the act of doing them is fun, and at others it's just a chore. Playing Puzzle Pirates is never a chore, but rarely something I'm glad to have done. I don't look back on a morning spent doing distilling puzzles and think "Oh yeah, I'm so glad I spent that time on this game. I got ten ratings of 'excellent' and four of 'incredible'. That sure was an accomplishment to treasure."

As I was playing the distilling puzzle earlier this evening, I couldn't escape the feeling that I was tranquilizing myself. That I was playing it not because it was what I wanted to do, but because it was something that would make me forget for a little while all the other things I wanted to have done. I wasn't even amusing myself; just drugging myself into a stupor. And it's one thing to spend my life in pleasant idle leisure, and another to spend it glazed-eyed and drooling.

So maybe I won't have a lot to show for today, but at least I made a couple of posts to my LJ. And that's one thing I'm glad to have done.