Mostly Game

Just a quick note for myself regarding fitness goals. I had lost 10 pounds in 2007, so my goal in 2008 was to drop another 11 pounds, from 196 down to 185. Unfortunately, I did nothing the first half of the year, then slowly went up 3 or 4 pounds before shedding them in Oct/Nov. My weigh-in on Thursday was 197.5, so a net gain of about 1.5 pounds. Better than putting the 10 back on, but not what I had in mind.

My goal for 2009 is to get down to 180, as well as turning in an 8-minute mile without killing myself, and continuing to work my way up to 100 consecutive push-ups without rest. I’d like to start easing into some CrossFit type stuff as well, albeit at a relatively low intensity. My sister wants to come out for a couple weeks and jump-start us on better nutrition and CrossFit, but we’ll have to see if that pans out.

So, someone over on BGG discovered One Hundred Pushups and, not content to suffer alone, got a whole slew of fellow geeks on the program. Not only am I on the program, but it’s gotten me fired up to get serious on fitness in general.

My brother-in-law Adrian is a CrossFit trainer. I hadn’t really looked into what CF is until now — I like their holistic approach to fitness, rather than a narrow view of only strength, or aerobic conditioning, or whatever. I like that the approach is the same regardless of age and current fitness levels; instead of changing the program, you simply adjust the difficulty of the exercises (e.g., can’t do a muscle-up? replace it 2:1 with dips and pushups). The same philosophy is used from kids to the elderly, from the novice to the elite athlete.

If I can just maintain this hunger (for lack of a better word) for getting into shape for long enough to ingrain the habit, I think I can stick with it. That’s part of the appeal of the hundred pushups program. It’s six weeks long, doing workouts three times per week. I don’t really care if I make it to 100 in the alloted time — I’ll be happy to actually stick to a program for that long and use that to springboard into regular exercise. I’ve been the Y three times so far, using the stationary bike machines to get a cardio/leg workout, ramping up the difficulty each time. I’m eying all the Cybex machines they have there, although CrossFit is more about free weights/exercises.

I’m even trying to leverage this into other areas of my life, particularly game design. Brian and I have no shortage of ideas and designs percolating, but we too often let them slide for other activities, like the pure time-sucking entertainment of Warhammer Online. We both have families and work, but it all boils down to setting priorities. I’m trying to put fitness and game design back up at the top, two things that I enjoy and want to commit to, and which will both pay dividends later in the forms of health and creative satisfaction (and maybe even the odd royalty check here and there).

Edit: … and actually, starting and maintaining a real blog is part of this refocusing effort. It’s a commitment to my primary reader (me); if anyone else reads this, it’s just gravy.