Chakra

While many large firms such as the one I work for have bonus plans which help "share the wealth" of the organization beyond salary remuneration, the firm I work for has other, ahem, benefits instead. One of these is a formal program to track weight and %bodyfat of employees. Participants even get a regular bar graph emailed to them to show progress (or failure). Sure beats a few thousand or tens of thousands of dollars each fiscal year end, yes?

My %bodyfat is more than 15% higher than it was when I was a runner. The new reading remains just inside the "healthy" range. Luckily the forgiveness factor increases as one ages (that is, one is 'allowed' to carry more fat because it grows more difficult to burn calories/fat as one ages given a slowed metabolism). I'm well within the "overweight" range for the age I was when I last ran a marathon, but that is to deny aging, so I'll take the new range category I'm in.

I did a yoga class for the first time in years on the weekend. I rediscovered my perineum -- there's a chakra there (Hui Yin). Actually what I rediscovered were my hip flexors -- I realized I haven't stretched my hip flexors since I was a runner, out of laziness and from the fact most such stretches are resisted by knees containing torn meniscal cartilidge. That resitance usually takes the sound of "holy fucking bejeebus that hurts," when trying to assume any of the seated postures in yoga.

Positively, it has been nearly 3 months since I returned to the gym and I have gone very regularly, even going when I was on holiday in Calgary. Results are becoming evident, although I still look like shit naked -- which is the utlimate test. Fitness used to be the outcome of something I yearned and loved to do -- run. I have needed to adjust my thinking, with looking better now the goal -- in that Trojan Horse will come the fitness and health benefits. The challenge is to find activities that won't bore me into a sedentary flabby mess on the road to personal-aesthetic accomplishment.

My lifting is coming along (benching half my body weight -- which is pathetic, I know, but well above the "unable to do the barbell alone in October" level), but deep cardio fitness eludes me 'cause I'm finding that trying to work as hard as one needs to in order to achieve arrogant levels of cardiovascular fitness is bloody impossible when one is bored to near fucking death by any of the stationary vehicles offered up for the chore in any gym...

Oh, and I am a little more than 15 (okay, okay, nearly 17) pounds heavier than when I was running, as well. Note, the added bulk is NOT the result of major muscle development.

And the phrase of the week is: perineal chakra!

PS -- sorry to bore you with this pointless ramble, but it works as motivation, and it's not like I have a wad of bonus cash to spend on something about which I could blog.