Expansion of exercise activities

A tip of the hat to Sergey who pointed out the irony in my last post before this latest hiatus being about procrastination. I’ve been working on some freelance projects and exercising occasionally which has used up most of my motivation of late. My process for writing this blog runs like this:

1. find random interesting topic serendipitously (generally while away from a computer)
2. think over the idea to expand it and test its viability for becoming a post
3. sit at the computer and turn idea to prose (if I do say so myself; god the ego)
4. relentlessly edit content for form and style
5. post

So as you can see there are a number of weak links in the chain that delay blogging despite my best intentions. Thankfully with work and exercise the chain is shorter: find time, do it. I’ve mentioned before that I started playing hockey again. Our winter season is now over and we have to wait a month or so before the summer season kicks off. We ended up doing quite well in league play, finishing fifth out of around thirty teams. Unfortunately, we were put out first round in the playoffs by a team that had a fair number of extremely strong players. We played well, kept ourselves in it and I was proud of our effort.

This season of hockey has shown me two truths about myself. The first is that I am badly out of shape when it comes to short burst stamina. This problem essentially puts me out of the game after the first period. I am trying to work on it by doing sprints in a nearby field but getting myself out of the house is problematic. The second truth is that my hockey skills are very rusty. I am currently playing defense which I was quite good at in high school about ten years ago. Time has taken its toll and my skills are all equally weakened from stick handling to skating and from heads up play to knowing my position. Campus Recreation is offering a hockey skills course this summer and I am planning on taking it. The first course is focused on individual skills and the second (running in the fall) will focus on team skills. I am planning on taking both and hopefully will bring my play up so as to not let my team down in the seasons to come.

The title of this post mentioned an expansion of activities and I will get to that presently. I’ve covered the topic of Parkour several times on this blog and now that it is summer again I will be joining my friends in and around campus once more. However, squash is actually the latest thing that I wanted to mention. A few weeks back a friend lost his partner to an ankle injury which he happened to bring up one day to me. I used to play a bit at Brock but hadn’t in quite a while — even though I have my own racquet and balls — so I offered to partner with him until his regular guy healed. I love squash, so once I started again it was all over. I was recounting how much I love squash at the office and found two more partners. Sergey who I’ve now played five or six times and Mike Iley who I’ll be playing for the first time next week.

This summer is shaping up to be a very active one. I am hopeful that this will be what I need to push my weight loss past its current stall and take me down to my target of two-hundred pounds. What are your summer exercise plans?