First World Problems and the Numb Zone

Exercise is fundamentally an odd thing when we do it not for any purpose but itself.

I mean, in years and centuries gone by, the condition of Mankind was that it worked hard to survive, to get sufficient bread and meat and water in its bellies to keep both hope and strength alive from one day to the next. For vast swathes of Mankind today, that's actually still the way of life - children pickking over rubbish dumps, men and women both in fields, women frankly doing a damn site more besides because their work is undervalued and not seen to have a designated end in any day. Labourers with hands and backs doing jobs that demand fuel and run their bodies at a high metabolic rate.

Then there are people like me.

Indisputable first-worlders, with, to coin a phrase, 'world enough and time' to have grown both fat and lazy (though it's important to understand the two are not in any way necessarily synonymous), plying skills that only have any value whatsoever in an information economy, and plying them from behind desks, at which we sit in some degree of comfort. For us, exercise is not a part of the natural rhythm of our lives, and so we do the oddest things in pursuit of it, in our little quests to burn off the calories we take in, in a kind of weird, false hat-tip to our fellow men and women who still burn energy day in, day out as part of the business of keeping their lives together. We go to gyms, and lie about it, pretending to enjoy ourselves. We walk pets in an effort to keep them and ourselves more healthy.

Or in my case, we go for long walks.
This is what I mean by exercise being an odd thing to do just for its own sake. If you have a purpose to your moving about, and you're a man, then when the purpose is satisfied, more than likely, you stop. If you're a woman of course, the thing no-one ever expressly tells you is that the purpose is never bloddy satisfied, but I digress. If you're just walking for the sake of walking, you actually need an equally false marker or moment to get you to stop doing it.

Case in point. I went walking relatively early today, so as to make the most of the dwindling daylight. I went up the road to my familiar gas station (the Norton Gas Station, for anyone who knows it), and the first roundabout leading to Dowlais. By which point, I'd gone a disappointing 2400 steps. I did the maths, and realised if I turned around then and went home, it would be fewer than 5000. But here's the thing. At that point, the exercise was still new to my system today, and was beginning to hurt me. But I shrugged at the numbers, and pushed on up the hill (yes, another hill. Seriously, the town's just made of hills) to a second roundabout, at a kind of second, 'No really, are you sure you want to go here?' gateway to Dowlais (Dowlais seems to be entirely unconvinced people should really want to go there). By the time I got there, the pain of the newness had worn off, but the numbers were starting to look a bit more interesing - somthing over 3000 steps done, meaning 6000 if I just turned round. I seriously considered it. Then I turned left, seeing a bus stop up another divergent hill. 'I'll just go to that, and that can be my past-the-second-roundabout marker,' I thought.

Reached it. Didn't count the steps. Pushed on. I'd entered the Numb Zone.
The Numb Zone is that point where your limbs have become used to the action you're taking, and so the usual markers that tell you 'you should stop now' have been quitened, because you've clicked in to the activity, and gotten 'in' to the doing of it. I walked through Dowlais, past a couple of familiar landmarks, and out into less familiar territory as the January sun thought 'Fuck this for a game of soldiers' and went to hide. I reached the point where I was on an unfamiliar road, by an unfamiliar church or chapel, and had the conscious thought that 'Either this goes round in a circle of the town, down through the Gurnos...orrrr it doesn't, and ends up somewhere in Pontsticill, which is not where I want to be, in the dark, on a Sunday night.'

All hail Google Maps, the Geographic Fuckwit's Friend. Turned out I'd missed the Gurnos turning, and was indeed heading out towards Pontsticill, land of reservoirs, evil bastard hills of distinction, sheep, road with no pavement and not a whole fuck of a lot else.
I turned round, went back to the turning I'd missed, walked along the road to the Gurnos, through an industrial estate, round the back of my old school, down past a house I used to live in, up and over another hill, Sycamore Road, where my grandmother used to live, and where, as she used to say, 'seven winds get together for a discussion on where to blow.' And from there, a simple drop down through the rest of the Gurnos back to house, coming mercifully to it from the top, rather than having to deal with the two evil bastard hills on which I technically now live, and about which I've recently bitched.

All in all, that'll get you over 12,000 steps. And the really weird thing is that as I sit here now, safely home and back behind my desk, I don't feel like I've done much at all, don't feel anything like as dead as shorter distances have recently made me. I'm not fool enough to think I'm yet getting accustomed to the whole wretched business of walking for the sake of it. it's the power of the Numb Zone - when you push past the initial pain of unexpected movement, and you just keep doing a thing. Were the streets better lit and were there not Sherlock to be home for and soup to be had, I could well have carried on for thousands more steps tonight, until the Numb Zone ran out and the next zone of 'No, really, if you keep this shit up, I'm gonna hurt you' kicked in.

So all hail the Numb Zone, and me finding a satisfying new route that gives me my daily step count. Takes a fuck of a long time which may not be practical on a day-job day, but still - at least now I know that it's there.

Something For The Weekend

Fuck you, cold weather!

Not because you stop me from exercising - clearly, you don't, this is...what, day eleven of this grand and glorious enterprise, during which, for the most part, I've hauled my gigunda-ass out the door and gone walking. No, fuck you, cold weather for the clothing.
It's cold, and while I might look like Brian Blessed's flabbier cousin, I'm a Grade A wuss-ass with diabetic feet, meaning I get cold sometimes even when people are disrobing and fanning themselves. In this kind of weather, fucking forget about it, I'm the shivering hair dumpling in the corner under a pile of blankets, shaking its doughy little fist at the Ice Giants and telling them exactly where to go as I guzzle my extra hot, wet skinny decaff sugar-free caramel misto. Venti, baby, because I need it!

But here's the thing. If it were just a battle between me and the wintry elements, I'd have this shit down. It hasn't gone unnoticed by people who actually know me that I have the body of a polar bear - covered in blubber with a thick coat of hair over top (everywhere except my head, thank you gods of never-getting-laid-again-ever!). So in some respects, despite the wuss-assery, the winter is my playground. I mean, I'm not about to break out my claws and display my astonishing ice-skating prowess, because - get the catch that is me - I have weak ankles, and have broken many bones south of the equator, down Mexico way. What's more, I've always had the balance of a penguin on a butter-strewn barrel, and have subsequently sustained what my specialist described as 'a severe insult to the organ of balance,' so ice skating, not my thing, but the winter, generally, more my playground than the summer, which serves mostly to render me down into bacon and lard.

But it's never just a battle between me and the elements. It's a battle between me, the elements and other people's reactions to the elements. I dress for winter when I go out - which today, when forcing a little over 8,000 steps into my day, had me walk down to town to collect my meds. And then, I had the bright idea of going for a heair and beard cut.

This was long overdue - I did Christmas and New Year mostly looking like an out-of-work, down-on-his-luck alco-Santa, and have inexpertly hacked at the facial fur a couple of times with scissors, just so that I had a fighting shot of getting my Christmas dinner in the right hole.

But of course, it's cold.
That means a) I'm dressed like Nanook of the North, or like Ralphy from A Christmas Story when sent out to play. I can barely move my arms, I'm so wrapped and covered. And b) people in shops have got their heating on high, to ensure they themselves don't have to dress like Scott of the Antarctic going about their daily business.

This is a bad combination for a fat fuck going for a haircut. By the time the lady behind the counter told me to take a seat, cos someone would be with me imminently, my forehead was throbbing and pink and drenched in rivulets of sweat, made more emphatic by my knowing they were there and knowing the lady was about to touch my head and get slicked with my fat-fuck head-sweat and ohhhh gooooood.

And so she was. I used to make up some excuse or other - believe it or not, I actually tried to con a Turkish barber, relatively recently, that I'd been caught in a sudden rainstorm. He laughed, playing along, then took a quick look out of his window (entirely unbedecked with raindrops), and went back to shaving my head with a rather more gruff tugging motion.

Now I don't say anything. She know it's head-sweat, I know it's head-sweat, she's just trying to surreptitiously trim my overgrown nose-hairs without letting on she knows they're not part of my moustache, and were she to trot out the old barbers' trope and ask me if I needed 'something for the weekend' - a euphemism I almost hope will be lost on the Americans in my readership, I'd probably opt for a shotgun, to put an early end to this particular 'fat fuck in cold weather' nightmare of utter grimness.

Om the one hand, I don't think she charged me anywhere near enough, at £9.50. On the other hand, neither did she get the moustache-trim right, so I suppose all's fair in money-making and ickness.

Still, far from acknowledging my own part in this mental melodrama, and realising if I weren't quite so fat, it wouldn't be quite such an issue, I'm going to turn the anger outward and say, as I did when I began, fuck you, cold weather! Fuck you, Jack Frost. Fuck you, in fact, winter, for the dastardly games of hot and cold you play.

Sigh. Right - 8,000 steps later, time to get on with the day. I'm still having a little trouble with post-Christmas day-recognition - which is what happens when you go back to work on the third of January, then take the fiftth and half of the sixth off, and then it happens to be the weekend. But as far as I can tell, today's Saturday. Three days to the next weigh-in. There will be an 18 in my near future, dammit.

The Double Decade Memory

Lovely day - no weighing, French bacon butty for breakfast, much decaffitude (note to self - never go and sit in a bookshop cafe on payday), and an Italian meal for dinner.

I know! Pasta!

Bottom line, I don't feel guilty about any of it. I'm not yet at the stage of weeping and wailing and flagellating myself raw for every calorie consumed. I daresay that insufferable joyfest will come, but it isn't here yet - it's waaaaay too early in a long-ass process to be doing that.

Besides, technically, I haven't overdone it today. Two meals, including a pasta portion, a soup and a piece of carbohydrate stuffed with bacon. By all means, don't call it a perfect day, but neither is it a particularly bad one. Neither bacon nor pasta's on my verboten list, it's all about portion control and the overall picture of the day.

I'm particularly not minded to worry about it having been reminded this evening that it's twenty years this week since I got the living crap kicked out of me on the streets of Merthyr on New Year's Eve, and spent the first week of the year in hospital, having my ankle bolted back together. There was talk of simply amputating my foot that New Year's Eve. So that's twenty years of having two feet I've had which were in no way guaranteed to me that night. That puts stuff into perspective. Am I going to worry about pasta tonight? Notsomuch.

I'm going to sit here, waggling my two feet and grinning, while planning to put both of them to work this weekend, pushing down the weight attached to me. Pushing down the burden that every day alive puts on those ankles, on these knees, and on this heart. That for me is a good day, and a good plan.

The Birthday Flake

It was d’s birthday today. I’d planned to take her to breakfast in Cardiff. I’d booked us an escape room – one of those Chrystal Maze-style puzzle rooms – with our friends Kelly and Mark. I’d booked us a dim sum lunch at a Chinese place that neither of us had ever been to before, but about which d had heard good things. And I’d booked us a room in one of our favourite Cardiff hotels. Y’know, cos of the whole mini-mini-break vibe of it being a birthday.

Ohhhh the master plannery. Every guy probably thinks he’s been really devious, but d fed my delusions of big bad evil genius by claiming she had no idea about the escape room until Mark and Kelly suddenly joined us in my usual Starbucks, just two minutes away from the room.  Score one for ego.

The escape rooms were, as I say, just a couple of minutes away from Starbucks, but they were, thanks to a broken-down lift, up three flights of stairs.

‘Hi. Do you…have a booking?’ said the guy we met at the top of the stairs.

‘Yep,’ I said. ‘1.30. name of Tony.’

‘Errrrm…are you sure?’ he asked. ‘Which room are you booked into?’

‘The Heist,’ I told him. ‘Gonna get our Ocean’s Eleven on, be all criminal mastermindy. Here,’ I said thrusting out my phone for him to check the email they’d sent me confirming the booking.

‘Yyyyeah, that’s not us,’ he explained. ‘That’s totally the other escape rooms that are nothing to do with us. They’re up by Cardiff Castle.’

‘Fuck,’ I muttered. ‘Right…’

It’s probably worth mentioning at this point that I had my laptop bag, d had her enormous shoulder bag, and we’d also just picked up a bag of birthday presents from Mark and Kelly, including a bone china cakestand. Also, the Januaryness, so we were in many, many layers, including scarves and hats.

I mentioned the three flights, right?

Down we went, hiking up the damned road.

Now here I absolve myself slightly – the guy at the first escape room had said the one we wanted was up by the castle, and by Burger King. Mark said he’d Googled it the night before, and he knew where it was. Sure enough, there it was – not exactly by the Castle or the Burger King, but it was definitely the right place: it even had ‘The Heist’ written on the door as one of the rooms you could play.

Fuck. More stairs. Three more flights. Seriously, escape room people, would it kill you to have some ground floor games, for wheelchair users more than fat fucks?

Anyway, we got up to the third floor again, and in the reception there were some hipster dudes with Edwardian beards, who seemed bound and determined to ignore us. But there were lockers for all our crap, so we didn’t have to take them into the room with us. We dutifully hung up coats, sweaters, hats, scarves, and jammed bags into lockers. Then we announced ourselves to them as having a 1.30 appointment. ‘The Heist,’ I said. ‘Name of Tony.’

‘We have nothing booked under that name,’ Edward VII flatly informed me. I shoved my phone forward to him. ‘It’s on the door,’ I begged. ‘This must be the right place.’

‘Nah, that’s our newest place,’ he explained. ‘Up by the Castle and Burger King.’

‘We are up by the Castle and Burger King,’ I muttered. ‘Seriously, a year ago, there wasn’t one of these places, now Cardiff has at least three escape room facilities on pretty much the same street?’

We sighed. We pulled bags out of lockers, grabbed hats and coat and scarves and sweaters off hooks, went down three flights and hiked up the street. Again. In the meantime, escape room three had called me to find out where the hell we were.

‘We’re minutes away,’ I told them. ‘Oh wait, here’s your door. We’ll be up in a minute.’

Three more flights.

‘Fuck it, it’s my birthday,’ said Donna, grabbing the new and working lift. In an effort to be a conscientious Disappearer, I took the stairs. Bad move. Once we got to the third floor reception, it turned out the actual room was up…another flight of stairs.’

I’d like to tell you we used up all our mental initiative just finding the place. Let’s just say, in the event of a zombie apocalypse, frankly, we’re all doomed. We had more help from our guide than was really fair, and extra time, and we still had quite some way to go to get out of room three of three. Me personally, I’d never have got out of Room One. I had one moment of success, but the rest was baffling to the point of what-the-hellishness. Basically, I held a flashlight – again, come the zombie apocalypse, go ahead and melt my fat ass down for candles.

Then there was lunch. Having schlepped through more of Cardiff than we’d ever intended, we were…at least notionally…closer to where Kelly and Mark had parked their car, than we were to the restaurant. We walked to the car, down a subway which Kelly was sure was the way. Mark insisted it wasn’t. He was right. We did later come to the subway Kelly’d thought it was, in fairness, and on we went. Mark drove us to the restaurant. There was nowhere to park, so we drove back to the train station, parked up and got a cab back to the restaurant.

‘You don’t need a cab to get there,’ argued the cabbie.

‘Trust me,’ said d, ‘by this stage in the day, we do.’ We did.

The restaurant had closed its main kitchen and was only serving sim sum.

There followed something of a dumplingfest. Meat dumplings, vegetable dumplings, rice rolls, an occasional char siu bun. I stopped earlier than I normally would, because, y’know, Disappearing and all that. d got to try a hot jelly for the first time, so that was… an experience. Then we walked back from the restaurant back to the station (so as to not risk the wrath of another cabbie!), then over to the mall to pick up some Krispy Kremes for Kelly, Mark and d. And finally, to our hotel. While d exchanged bottles of fizzy water for still and red wine for rose, I went out for one last walk – to grab a Starbucks and pick up some more water.

Result? Nearly 11,000 steps. So much for a relaxing birthday!

Disappearingwise? Sure, 11,000 steps is good enough for me, and it’s not like I’ve overindulged especially – yes, there were dumplings, but there was no breakfast, and the dumplings were all I ate today, so I’m happy enough with it.

Back to work tomorrow, and a day into which I will have to artificially force some exercise.

And while it’s not exactly been a relaxing or pampering day by any stretch of the imagination, hopefully, it’s been an unusual, funny, typically ‘Tony’ day for my girl.

I have a Plan for next year.

Already.

Be afraid. Be very afraid…

The Uphill Struggle

Sigh.

Since the post-pizza moment yesterday, no more bathroom trips for Yours, Disappearingly. Consequently, the meals are piling up in my system. Sometimes, I even depress myself - weighed last night before going to bed. Grumped my way back into the bedroom.
'Y'OK honey?' said d.
'Fine,' I grumbled. 'But I've got three meals in me...'
She laughed, bless her.

Two more meals since then. Feeling huge and full and bloated.

Had a hard day's day-jobbery and editing, which meant by 5pm, I'd travelled all of 137 steps in the day.

Decided I wanted to do something more, something bigger and more challenging. So tonight I headed off up something called Penyard Hill, and along a ridge that allows you to look down on the town centre. I've always looked down on the town, so Penyard makes a certain intrinsic sense to me, and it's the first of Merthyr's many hills on which I lived as a child. I walked down from the ridge, ending up at the town's Tesco store. Walked around that for a while, for no terribly good reason. Then decided to walk up the high street home.

For thos who don't know, Merthyr is a town built of all the hills left over after Indianna was rolled out with the geolocial equivalent of a steamroller. Even the downhills go up in Merthyr, it's a geographical absurdity. The high street leads upward and flows into a second, steeper incline called Pontmorlais, and at the top of Pontmorlais, our house now clings to the side of an enormo-hump, like a giant geological zit, which involves trekking up two fundamental bastard hills - we live at the almost very top of the second of them.

Which is why we take a lot of cabs since moving out of our flat in the town centre.
By the time I got to the two utter bastards, I was realising how long it's been since I've done anything like that. By the time I'd clawed my way to the top of the first bastard, I was gasping, thinking 'Fuck it, I'll just live here, by this lamppost.' In fact, I actually texted d from that lamppost, at the bottom of our street, to say as much.

By the time I got in through the door I was a sweat-drenched, breathless pug of a human being.

Which of course is one of many, many reasons to do this damned thing in the first place. Still - reasonably good eye-opener, that. One has a tendency to think that nothing has changed in one's fitness level until the real world smacks one in the face with a two-by-four. Or an evil bastard hill.

Onward! Upward! Downward through the stone-counter, dammit!

The Madness of Disappearing Mathematics

Arrrrrrgh!

Hoping to see an 18, did I say?

This morning, in the positively chilly air that swpet majestically through our bathroom on its way to somewhere less scary, I weighed in, pre-bathroom (if you take my meaning), at 19st 1.5.

I waited.

And waited.

And peed. And weighed in again, just before lunchtime. Having pulled on a pair of heavy socks as protection against the cold, I then weighed in at 19st 2.25!

I discarded the socks, swearing calumny and a world of evils on their woolen soles. 19st 0.75.

Three-quarters of a pound away from the border, still 'pre-bathroom.' That, gentle observers of this Disappearing madness, is what I'm recording as my official weigh-in weight on this first weekly weigh-in. Down 6.75 pounds this week, still presumably burning up the excess stored water in my system.

Now let's be clear - this is pretty damn good. There's plenty to celebrate in this - it means since I began my week of 'pre-Disappearing' having seen a result of 20 stone, I've lost 13.25 pounds, probably all of it stored as excess water. But let's also be clear about the Disappearing mindset. This is one frustrating-as-hell result. One pound would have put me in the 18s, which, even if it's by the tiniest squeak, you need to believe me, feels a whole hell of a lot different to being in the 20s. As far as the difference is concerned, you might as well be talking centuries as stones.

And here's the extra-sepecially galling thing. I then had lunch, and for that lunch I had pizza. really quite a lot of pizza - there being no better time to have a heavy-ass day than post-weigh-in on a Tuesday, and there also at the moment being a shitload of really tasty homemade pizza left in our house.

So - much nomming of the pizza. Even before I was done, the urge to be 'post-bathroom' was upon me, and once I'd finished the really rather quite a lot of pizza, I fulfilled the urge in a rather prodigious manner. And yes, I weighed again.

Because I'm a monomaniacal nightmare, that's why.

After the enormo-pizza lunch, and the prodigious purge, I evened out at 19st 2.

Now, you're probably beginning to get a sense for the nature of my insanity, so it won't come as too much of a surprise to you to learn that as this aftenoon wears on, I'm inwardly bemoaning the fact that I didn't weigh the pizza before I ate it, so that I could claim with more legitimacy than hope that 'really' (and please not the absurdity of that 'really'), I'm under the 19 stone mark. I'm not of course, the official number today is 19st 0.75, but yes, everything in me (with the possible exception of the pizza) wants to claim this landmark. This is the madness of Disappearing Mathematics.

At some point, prrrrobably quite soon, I shall be needing to be hit on the head with something fairly heavy to break me out of this cycle of insane addition and subtraction. But for now, people tell me there are other important things to do besides worry about the weight of pizza versus the weight of really-not-pizza-anymore.

They're wrong of course, but I've found they go away faster if you smile and nod and pretend to agree with them.

So this is me, smiling and nodding and pretending to agree with them, and not obsessing at all about the calculable weight of cooked dough...

The Night-Before Nerves

And noooooow, the time is heeeeere, and so I faaaaaace, my first new weiiiigh-innn...

Tomorrow morning, whatever the Nazi Scales, in their black little digital heart, decide to show me, it's what we record. I've had a week of pre-Disappearing, in which I went down from 20 stone to 19 stone 7.5. And then a week of Disappearing proper, including every day walking, during which I will have achieved...whatever the Nazi Scales allow me in the morning.

Naturally, I'm quite nervous about the first weigh-in. I'm nervous because I have a feeling I've fallen into bad, if natural Disappearing habits, such as having only a few meals a day, with nothing in between. That has a tendency, or so I'm told, to slow the metabolism, leave it purring like a kitten that's never known hardship, but doesn't especially help when it comes to shifting the weight. The first week's weight loss of course is mostly water. The second, as far as I recall, is mostly water too, btu these first two weeks can give you quite a boost. You don't need me to tell you that - the first week droppped me almost seven pounds. Who knew I was that subcutaneously soggy? I won't lie to you though, life already feels significantly easier.

Nor will I lie to you about tomorrow - I'd love to see an 18, which would mean losing 7.75 pounds at least over the course of this second week. Unlikely, of course, but one has to dream. More likely I'll be down 'some pounds.' Two pounds or over, and Tony's a happy boy - as much as you have to dream, you also have to temper your dreams to reality and stay the course you've set for yourself.

It's funny though, the way the night-before nerves can get to you. Last night, d made pizza while I went out walking. We settled down around 9.30, and I had three smallish squares of what was frankly gorgeous - note in case this sounds weird, you're actually allowed pizza on my weird, self-imposed regime, you're just not allowed any sort of satisfying amount of it at a time, especially later in the evening.

I spent most of today in Cardiff, at my Starbucks. Yes, you're allowed Starbucks too, but you have to be sensible about it. My own bizarre concoction, courtesy of my mate Harry, who used to work there, is a...(draws deep breath...) Venti Decaff Wet Extra Hot Non-Fat Sugar Free Caramel Misto. A Misto, for those who've never encountered it, is equal parts coffee and milk. And if you Non-Fat it, it's a whole lot of drink for roughly 130 calories a time. Four or five of those a day and you feel relatively full, because of course you are relatively full, and for surprisingly little in terms of calories.

On the way home, d, who knows the night-before nerves of old, asked 'So...pizza tonight then? Or something lighter?'
I squirmed, because the pizza, it should be noted, is fricking excellent. You've never had pizza like this. But am going for the lighter option, simply because it's the night before a weigh-in. That, my friends, is the night-before nerves. I'm having pizza for lunch tomorrow, beyond a shadow of doubt. But tonight...something less, simply because the 'main meals, no snack' routine has slowed the metabolism, or certainly the digestive system down, and I have it within me to actively resent the food that doesn't make it out of my system by weigh-in time tomorrow. I am that idiot.

So this is me, drinking water to try and flush out my system, and having something lighter than pizza for dinner, to pay tribute to the night-before nerves and aim to skew numbers and physics and Nazi Scales in my favour.

Here's hoping.