Anaerobic

It's been at least a month since my last confession, and of course I have sinned. But where do I start?

The first confession is my obsessive-compulsive, production-editorial approach to exercise. In the back of my DayRunner pocket planner - I guess that's the first confession, that I carry and use a DayRunner pocket planner, a tabbed weekly calendar with quarterly section - is a small, three-month calendar where I subdivide each day to record my workouts. Each part of the grid shows how many minutes I practiced this or that - taiji, qigong, upper-body, whatever - each day. At the end of the month, I can add up how many days I practiced each thing. I know, I'm a freak.

The second confession, based on the data from the first confession, is that I have done an aerobic activity an average of once a week during the last three months. Walking the dog doesn't count. Anybody knows that once a week doesn't do much for cardiovascular fitness. Phys ed majors of the world, forgive me, for I have sinned. My aerobic condition is woeful, and some things in this life are unforgiving, oxygen debt being one of them. My heart and lungs would be laughing at me, but they're out of breath after climbing the stairs. I will pay for this.

It's a daily practice, this practice of writing down how much of each practice I practice and leaving an ugly tell-tale X on my calendar when I don't. And it's a monthly practice to total the days, read it and weep, or pat myself on the back. And it's a quarterly practice, because my planner is organized that way, my classes register that way, and the seasons change. So we're starting a shiny new quarter, turning over a new leaf and all that, an opportunity to do myself a favor and get on the bike a little more often.

My new Monday night class at the new rec center - which, by the way, was designed by our favorite tech gurl Magrit's father - is off to a good start. The six students are very different from each other, which makes it challenging to communicate effectively with all of them but helps them to learn from each other, I hope. The ongoing Thursday night classes at the old rec center in the old neighborhood are taking shape too. A couple of new students have joined, and the mix of athleticism, yogicism, and inquisicism* looks like it will balance out, I hope. The fledgling Wednesday and Friday classes at the Factory have had a lot of no-shows lately, so I just work out on my own, which isn't bad either.

[*made-up word]