What I’ve Learned So Far

Trollope did it to keep up his writing output. Businesspeople do it to keep up with sales, leads, units manufactured, et cetera ad infinitum. I’ve been doing it to track my progress on workouts.

What kind of progress? First, as a practical matter, it’s not just useful but vital to know what combinations of sets and reps and weights you used on your last workout. If you’re serious about weightlifting, you should be trying to make strength gains week in and week out. But how will you know you’ve progressed if you can’t recall what you did from one workout to the next?

Second, as a form of moral support, keeping a log helps you remember where you’ve come from so you can celebrate the milestones that have brought you to where you are, even when the milestones are tiny. To someone else, moving up the weight rack to do curls with 30-pound dumbbells would seem trivial, but it’s not trivial to you if you started with 15-pounders.

Finally, keeping a log helps you to detect patterns that inform your current and future efforts. For instance, one of my current goals is to use weightlifting to bulk up a little bit. Given my starting point and my age (16-year-old boys have a huge advantage here), that’s sure to be a slow process. Even though I’ve known that from the outset, I was still a little upset with my slow progress — until this past weekend, when I went back through my workout log and copied my daily bodyweight numbers over into a little spreadsheet.

Instantly, I saw the patterns that have emerged from six weeks of hard work and consistent measurement: every week to ten days, I say goodbye to some lower poundage — 164, for example. On an overlapping schedule, every week to ten days I say hello to some new higher poundage — 170, for example.

It’s inevitable that there are fluctuations in my weight throughout the week. These are like the ebb and flow of little waves on the beach. But by doing a straightforward bit of data analysis, I can see that the tide is rising steadily underneath those little waves.

Boom — data-driven self-encouragement!

What are you doing to track your progress against your goals?

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(Photo by angelamaphone, used under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.)

You know, I was writing a big ol’ blog post . . . and it just didn’t work. So you’re spared from my long-winded thoughts on public policy.

AT LEAST FOR TODAY.

Count your blessings where you find them.

Bulletin: it’s just as disorienting to the drivers around you when you go super-duper slow as when you go super-duper fast.

Twice in the past two days I’ve had drivers in front of me nearly foul up the works for me and others because they went through small intersections a good 10 m.p.h. slower than most folks would.

As I tell my kids, who are still years away from driving age: be predictable when you’re driving.

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Related:

• In which I begin to vent my traffic peeves, starting with the use of parking lights.

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Don’t take his writing advice personally — but do take it to heart.

Key bit:

When you understand that nobody wants to read your shit, your mind becomes powerfully concentrated. You begin to understand that writing/reading is, above all, a transaction. The reader donates his time and attention, which are supremely valuable commodities. In return, you the writer, must give him something worthy of his gift to you.

Funny, but as I was reading this piece a P.R. person sent me a mass e-mail flagged as “Important!”

It occurred to me, for maybe the 4,000th time, just how little credence I put in a P.R. person’s idea of what’s important.

In other words . . . what Pressfield said.

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ADDENDUM: Ach, I neglected to credit my good friend Russ Somers for pointing out the Pressfield post to me.

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Related post from last year:

• Rapid-fire 4: Good book: The War of Art (Pressfield wrote it.)

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. . . is an insult to gnats.

I mention this because a couple of weeks ago I tweeted that “I have the attention span of a gnat,” and now there’s a delegation of gnats marching up and down on my cubicle wall, demanding that I stop defaming them. They’re carrying tiny, tiny pickets.

Why the two-week delay? Hey, they’re gnats — they’re not exactly the world’s experts in organizing.

Which brings me back to my original point.

It’s been raining a lot in Austin lately — and thank goodness, because we’ve had an awful drought this year.

But the rain has exposed me, again and again, one of my traffic peeves. I refer to the use of parking lights when headlights are called for.

People, it’s simple:

• If you’re parked somewhere and need to indicate that your car is occupied — for example, in a loading zone — use your parking lights.
• If your car is moving and you need any lights, use your HEADlights.

Really, it’s not that hard, is it?

A note: I intend to vent a few more of my peeves here, but understand that I’m also willing to consider alternate good explanations — UNLIKELY AS THEY MIGHT BE — for doing the things that peeve me. To put it another way, I’m willing to revise my biases, IF you’re willing to lead me down that road.

Be aware that it will take some doing.

Anyone want to stand up for using parking lights instead of headlights when your car is moving?

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(Parking light photo; headlight photo.)

From Michael King’s commentary in the current issue of the Austin Chronicle:

I don’t believe TxDOT and the highway lobby recruited double agents to run Cap Metro into the ground and thereby discredit forever even the possibility of serious mass transit in Central Texas — it only seems that way. It’s unlikely that laid-off screenwriters from The X-Files are responsible for the inexplicable delays that have made the agency’s agoraphobic commuter train a public laughingstock.

It goes on from there.

More damning analysis, this time from Ben Wear of the Austin American-Statesman. These are the opening grafs:

Capital Metro didn’t know what it was getting itself into.

That might sound like a shot from one of the transit agency’s critics. Instead, it is in effect the agency’s explanation for why its MetroRail commuter line from Leander to downtown Austin is now 15 to 18 months late in opening. And still counting.

Capital Metro, by its own admission, didn’t know when it asked voters in 2004 for permission to build the 32-mile line how complex an undertaking it faced, or the full scope of the project, or the work and time required to fix glitches and malfunctions that would arise along the way.

What? Complexity in adding an entirely new mode of transport to a previously bus-only transit system? Un-possible!

Read further in both articles . . . but only if you have a stomach for incompetence that hinders the public weal.

Much better, thank you.

Yesterday I took off a little early from work to get that massage I talked about. My masseuse, who by every outward appearance is a kindly, neighborly sort of person, attacked my muscles remorselessly. She was, for an hour, the Al Capone of fiber-loosening.

Results: felt much better afterward, and, although I was a little stiff last night when I went to bed and am tweakier still as I write this, I slept through the night for the first time all week.

Let us hope this is a new dawn of neck comfort in my life.

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(Photo by Eric Hill, used under a CC-Share Alike license.)

I’m seeing the massage therapist today. Well, not so much with the “seeing” — mostly I’ll be lying facedown on the table and trying to regulate my breathing.

If that doesn’t help, we’ll proceed to the sports-medicine portion of the buffet.

Updates as warranted . . .

This is approximately what it feels like:

Okay, I exaggerate. A LITTLE.

The dumb thing: I hurt it the other day at the gym . . . while I was putting weight plates back on the rack, one at a time, after I had finished all of my lifting.

So, to recap:

• Sets of 360# leg presses? No problem.
• Sliding a 45# plate back onto its peg? Days of annoying pain, tossing and turning in bed, et cetera.

That is all.

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(Image by Pierre J., used under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.)