Today has been a pleasant, lackadaisical day. I did a whole bunch of word vomits yesterday. Today I woke up kinda late despite sleeping not too late (before midnight), and I just went with it. I finished reading Xenocide, and I had a healthy lunch and dinner prepared by my wife. We watched a silly movie (Lucy… hilariously bad) and then lazed around before going for a run.
I’m trying to improve my 2.4km timing, and my main approach to that is to simply run 2.4km over and over again until I feel like I know what I ought to work on specifically. The first few timings were pretty bad– 16 minutes, 15:30, 16, 15:40. And every single time I found that I’d go a little too fast at some points, and then have to stop to walk for a while. This time I tried to make sure that I jogged the whole way through, and broke the 15 minute barrier with a 14:52. It’s still a “fail” timing, I think. And I feel like I really want to invest time into getting a great time. I would be happy to go under 12 minutes, really, really happy to go under 11, and if I can do under 10 I would be absolutely overjoyed. I would have surpassed my wildest expectations as a teenager. And I’m not even 25 years old yet.
I was hoping to go to bed by 11, but I underestimated how much time it would take for me to cool down after my run, and to get home. It’s 11:50pm now. But I felt a bit uneasy, and I realized it’s because yesterday I made a promise to myself to have no zero days with regards to my word vomits. It would be pretty shitty to have a blank space the very next day, so here I am writing one before I go to bed. I hope it’ll strengthen my decision muscle and make me feel a little bit more like a man of my word. I also want to wake up early tomorrow, so I’ll try to make this as quick as possible.
I’m tired of being tired. I’m tired of feeling like I haven’t made a lot of progress on any front. I suppose not doing vomits for almost two weeks and not making much progress on my runs and gym sessions (I started too fast, too hard), and not sleeping very well… all of those things just compound into a “miserable” existence.
But so it’s just about focusing on the basics, right? I’ve definitely made progress even if I don’t feel it. I think a lot of it is in my body. I’m 79kg now. For as long as I can remember, I was 64.5kg. I was going to the gym and trying to gain weight and I simply couldn’t. And then I got married and started work and I didn’t feel like I had any time to work out (also I wasn’t familiar with the location of the new gym, and I didn’t really like the running routes available to me). But I figured, hey, I’ve been in stasis for most of my life– not terribly unfit– so things can’t change too drastically, right? Well… everything gets harder when you suddenly weigh 15kg more. That’s like, 33 pounds. That’s insane. I look the same to me when I look in the mirror. But I can’t do as many pullups. I can’t do as many pushups. I can’t run as fast. And all of those things really weigh me down and they probably affect my sleep and other things.
Nyeh. I got distracted at this point and wasted a bunch of time online. Which is completely not what I had intended here. I suppose now this has to go partially from being some sort of… I don’t know what I intended, to being a sort of reminder of failure.
Am I being too hard on myself? I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think there are still things that I need to learn about myself, such as… if I’m going to do something I need to do it right. I should have been asleep an hour ago. But now that I’m still here, and I realize the situation that I’m in, I should just race through the finishing line.
I suppose a few weeks from now I will be happy that I managed to keep the no-zero-days streak going, even if it meant messing up my sleep slightly…? It’s not too bad. I’ve done worse. I’m tired from having run, so I should be able to fall asleep quite quickly once I publish this. Though sleep should be my highest priority, maybe, even over the vomits? Well, I guess that’s for me to work on tomorrow.
It just feels so silly that I can spill so many words on this and yet not see much progress. Are there global standards on this sort of thing? How long does it usually take lifelong procrastinators to get their acts together? What are the conditions like? I feel like most people talk about general principles but they don’t talk very much about specifics. Like, I’m sure there are stats on how long it takes people to quit smoking once they’ve been smoking for X amount of years. Theoretically, the longer and heavier you’ve been smoking, the harder it should be to quit, and the longer it should take. Though there will always be some cases where people just have had enough and quit cold turkey on the spot and never touch it again. Is it about stakes? Context? Do they manufacture it, or do they get lucky, or both?
I guess ultimately it doesn’t really matter as long as I’m improving on what I did yesterday. Just that that little thing doesn’t seem to be happening. But fuck it, right now all I’m doing is running to the finish line here. And when I’m done I’m going to shut this thing down and go to bed so that I can start better tomrrow.
Done