The Fame Factor

See...I'd forgotten that.

Anyone remember Fame?
Can't imagine I've got readers...

Well, essentially, I can't imagine I have readers, period. But I certainly can't imagine I have readers who are too young to remember Fame. Fame the TV series I mean, not Fame the movie.

OK, anyone who can remember Fame the TV series will remember the opening, where the dance teacher gives perhaps the guiding line of philosophy for everyone in the performing arts for the following three decades.

"You want Fame. Well Fame costs...and right here is where you start paying...in sweat."

What I've either forgotten recently, or gone screamingly out of my way to block out of my brain, is that the same is true of Disappearing.

I've done a solid bit of gymming recently, and I've done the sweating, but it's been pretty much genteel, almost-incidental sweating. Likewise with the walking - I've been drenched when I got back, but that was little more than the result of a Fat Fuck Walking, rather than the effort of a Fat Fuck Really Pushing It.

Today I did a weigh-in that shocked the bejeesus out of me. Yesterdays did that too, but today's was insane. I can say muscle weighs more than fat all I like, I can raise a choir to sing it to the gods and demons and Nazi Scales, I can hide behind conspiracy theories of battery fuck-uppage, but today's weigh-in was purely mental, and it could be accurate.

Which means that, with my certainties rattled, I jumped on the bike and pedalled like I meant it for the first time in weeks. I mean literally weeks. Recently, it's taken me an hour and a half to burn 300 calories, and I've felt bored and exhausted and righteous for doing it, but today, the oldi biking vibe came back to me...

What's the old biking vibe? The old biking vibe is something I think of as the Shedful of Shit Principle.
Years ago, I read a book called Mort, by Terry Pratchett - it was the first of his books I'd read, and it has a teenager in it who, for reasons not relevant here, ends up having to muck out a stable that hasn't been mucked out in years. Pratchett explained the teenager's rigorous mindset - Faced with an enormous task, he broke it into smaller sections, and then faced with those smaller sections, he divided them into sections smaller still. And then he factored in the time he had to do the task, and worked out a plan whereby he raced himself, seeing if he could do x number of small sections within the hour, and so on.

That's the old biking spirit. In fact, that's the old Disappearing spirit all round. I always used to assign numbers and race myseld, and it pushed up my heart rate, my miles biked, my calories burned. And today, it did it again - I decided to see if I could burn 10 calories per minute, consistently, over the course of an hour. That would mean I burned 600 calories in an hour - rather than the pathetic 300 calories in an an hour and a half.

To be fair, it seems to be a mindset used in everything in my life - right now, I'm working to edit 100,000 words for my first client. And I've broken it down into target numbers of words per day over the number of days of the contract - the Shedful of Shit Principle at work again (which is not to cast aspersions on the quality of the work).

So between the Fame Factor and the Shedful of Shit Principle, it's been quite an alliterative day. Not that that changes the fact that the unofficial weigh-in today was insane (which perhaps is a lesson to stop freakin' doing it, but hey, 14 months in, that doesn't look likely!). On to tomorrow - am ditching d while she goes Aquacising, and I head down the Trail on a Proper Walk. Might meat back up for a gym session, or might now, we'll see. Certainly going to be an active weekend though, and Monday in back to being a London Monday - hoping to meet up with my pal Brenda again (haven't been able to do that for months, as am now usually overwhelmed with work. Not, I hope, this time though...) and do a lunchtime walk with her while catching up.

So who knows? Tuesday is its own special Hell or Heaven - I'm not going to predict it from here. But it's definitely time to start Proper Sweating again on a regular basis, and try to re-ignite what feels like a slumbering metabolism to get me back on track. Right here is where I start paying - again - in sweat.