If running is the cheap coffee of exercise, what are weighted carries? I dunno yet.
It’s Sunday. I went on a run on Friday, deliberately a little slower, planning to run again today a little slower as well, the idea being to do more runs in less time and so dial down the intensity to help make that possible. Then yesterday I did weighted carries in the back yard for maybe ten minutes and today I feel very tired so I think I won’t run. There’s that expression, I think from Shakespeare, about how the best laid plans of mice and men are something something. This is like that, which is to say, this is a mouse’s fault. No good mice, those dirty rats.I was going to talk about the weighted carries - the weights and times, how I put together the weighted duffle bag I use - but that’d be so boring. I once heard someone say that only the people who love us will listen to us recount our dreams, and it’s only something they endure because they love us. I don’t know if that’s true, but surely recounting the nuts and bolts of an exercise routine is far worse. Recounting a dream about exercise, now THAT would be worse yet, or like what if it was a dream about falling for a phishing scam and having to sit on hold on the phone with the bank as a result? Yowza.
Yesterday the weather was gorgeous, slightly warmer than sweater weather but still lovely. I’m hoping it holds today, I’m planning to take a walk with each of my older kids. I hung out with them a long while yesterday, my wife and youngest had gone to a party so we played a computer game they like that we can’t really play with the five year old around. We were still playing when she got home and she was like ‘WHAT is THAT’ and asked loads of distracting questions. It’s nothing age inappropriate - it’s this game my kids found where you’re a city and you build up resources and can go to way with other cities if you want (and sometimes if you don’t want, if the computer-run cities attack you) - it’s just that the rate of questions from the five year old comes fast enough that there’s little attention left to actually play the game.
Speaking of attention, earlier in the day my wife went to get her car a pre-winter check up, fluids and whatnot, I dunno, it was a free event at a local school. I made lunch and then decided to move prints around. We have some art prints up on the wall and I’d sort of begun to tune them out visually, so I swapped their positions so I’ll notice them again. There’s a metaphor in here, aging into a stage of life where you fail to notice lovely things because you’re accustomed to them, it’s like Shakespeare said, mice and men are beautiful but you have to plan to move them around regularly or they become boring. This is Al Shakespeare, he ran an evil scientist lab where he strapped men into big hamster wheels and made them run at high speeds while covered in mice, he’s a university president now, last I heard.
Maybe weighted carries are the drinking shots of exercise? Takes little time, effect lasts a lot longer, really takes it out of you, kind of easy to overdo it? That feels right. Oh come to think of it I also lifted weights a little in my garage before the weighted carries, that's like having a couple beers, well-paced, chilled out and civilized, and weighted carries afterward was slightly misjudged - beer before liquor, never been sicker. Shakespeare said that, about a truly appalling experiment he ran on one of his terrible man-mouse hybrids, the mind recoils to imagine it.
