Finally Made It Up Beyond 1 Hour/Day

It looks like wearing a little more protection was the answer to making it.
This week, I’ve averaged about 63 min.

There were two parts to this. I now wear jeans whenever I bike, and
socks whenever I’m out of bed (otherwise they get bonked/cut too often).

P.S.: after reading a new Cool’s Illustrated Korean quick-BBQ recipe
(hint: the marinade isn’t instant), I’m speculating that a special
hydrating goop I make for riding could double as a marinade. The
recipe calls for pureed pear for its acid and helpful flavoring, and
soy sauce as a brining agent. My goop usually involves several
different pureed fruits, often including a probably-similar-in-effect
apple. It also includes salt and sugar and oil. About the only
common marinade ingredient that’s not there is garlic. Am I
marinating my interior? Good thing for gastric linings.

Exercise Barriers

I’m having a big problem breaking an average of a little under an hour
a day. I’ve succeeded in making it pretty rare that I miss my
20-minute “minimum”. And more and more often, I can exercise for 40
minutes, which makes for a decidedly nicer day still.

BUT. Getting above a 50-60 min/day average is hard for me. I’ve been
pretty much around this threshold for almost a year and a half, with
some breaks (see travel problems, below). I’ve tried thing after thing
after thing.

I’ve tried an exercise bike, making it easier to bike, making my own
hydration goop, biking twice/day, etc. No good.

My current theory is that I’m getting too physically battered and need
to wear more protection. Certainly, my legs look battered beyond
belief most weeks when the biking’s good. So next I’m trying doubling my
socks and wearing jeans.

NeuroExerciseMath 101

At first, I was going to get a huge post out the door on this subject,
including all my various calculations, but realized it’d take too long
and be too forbidding as a big chunk for reading, anyway. I’m just
going to start with the basics, and get more complicated later.

I’ve found it handy to think in a particular kind of unit for planning
purposes: time spent exercising.

The first thing I tried to do in neural exercise math was to decide
how much exercise I needed to roughly stay even. I found I was able
to decide whether or not I was positive or not by whether I felt
depressed and stupid. But it takes me a while after exercise to
decide. So I couldn’t just sit on the bike machine until a bell went
off, but had to try a bunch of different levels.

Every day, I do my best to get at least that amount of exercise,
though, of course, generally I try for alot more to move back toward
pre-disease neural levels.

More recently, using that as a base, I’ve used neural exercise math to
get a rough picture of how long it might take to get back my
pre-disease neuron levels. I’ll post on that later.

Starting

Starting is probably the hardest part, especially since enterprise is
one quality the disease robs us of.

I was able to use my stopping of driving as my driver to start. At
that point, to keep my job, I had to take some combination of bus,
bike, and foot to get places. My city’s Metro has a nice system that
lets you carry bikes on the fronts of buses, allowing for wide
flexibility and providing a solution to one intrinsic bus problem of
stops being not being close to most places.

I’ve since lost my job and gone on disability, hopefully temporarily
while I recover my neurons, but it was easy to stay with the pattern
of serious daily biking because I’d already started.

Another way that might help is if you announce your exercise plan to
some friend or family member, that may help tie the commitment to your
brain. Plus, it’ll probably help to to talk over the details of your
plan with somebody else. I did.

No matter how you start, you’ll have to start small and work up
annoyingly slowly from there. And prepare to start from near-scratch
again and again whenever you travel or the inevitable long-term
injuries to bike or human happen.

My plan involved a complicated combination of bus, bike, and walking.
The buses have a route that involves a single change of bus, have
a stop 1/8 mi away from home, and about 1.1 mi from where work was.
My plan was to start small and work up to biking to the closest bus
stops (“biking short”, I called that – it totalled to 20min, a bit
above what I feel to be my daily minimum to stay in rough place).
Then I worked slowly up to biking at least every once in a while the
whole distance to the spot where I changed buses – about halfway
(“biking long”). Then I did that more and more often. My hope was to
get to biking the whole distance, at least most days, but that turned
out to be impractical.

It turns out that almost as much naptime as biketime is needed
whenever I bike more than about twenty minutes (to absorb the
neurons somehow?). Thus, it was impractical to bike more than
halfway (biking and bus took the same amount of time). Unless I
wanted to spend even more than four hours a day effectively in
transit.

Even the short-term injuries and other problems will be annoying,
because it only takes one day of not exercising to start
establishing a brain cell deficit and starting to move toward
depression. I hate those days, but there’s no avoiding the occasional
one.

Trip Grumble And Suggestions

Trips are always annoying for me. I can never maintain any high
rate of exercise on them. In fact, there’s always at least one day
where I can’t even manage to get in even my minimum of 18ish aerobic
minutes. It takes some luck to be able to successfully exercise on
days when you travel.

Days like that are, as at home, somewhat depressing, and I tend to
lose things and generally feel stupider. But the impact is worse than
at home because you need to adapt more on trips and there are more new
things to appreciate.

I find it invaluable to stay at a place that has an exercise room of
some sort. So far, every exercise room I’ve seen has included a
bike. Once, that was the only working equipment…. A few times I’ve
let a higher hotel cost deter me, and always regretted it. It’s worth
every penny to worry less about losing things, and be able to fully
appreciate what you paid so much to see.

To keep at exercise on travel, I always have to either plan to go at
the start of the day or some other recurring, plausible part of the day.
The experience and problems are different enough that it took me a few
trips before I started really getting down the habit of getting in
daily exercise.