Progress and More Changes
June 17, 2020
As A Quick Update To Wy Web Development Studies,
I wanted to make a note of where I am vs. where I wanted to be(?) and figured putting it here would be a good idea. \ \ I have 50 hours of web development classes I was hoping to accomplish over the course of 8 weeks, about 6 hours a week. It has been about 3 weeks since I started and I have completed just about 14 hours, coming in under my goal by 4 hours which is not an insignificant amount to miss. I can only point to myself for this delay as there haven’t been too many things dividing my attention beyond my hobbies and the normal suspects of TV, Movies and video games. The truth is I need to focus more and to get a quick refresher on that on week 3 as opposed to week 6 is a good thing. \ \ On the positive end I am blown away by what I have learned in this time period though. Any hardened web developer would probably be of the opinion that my review has been a bit of a waste of time both in terms of productivity and in terms of return on investment. After all I have spent 14 hours on classes and I haven’t even reached the javascript section, how difficult could HTML and CSS possibly be?\ \ The answer is, not hard, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot to learn. To be fair, HTML is incredibly straight forward, and you can learn most of everything you want for it in a few hours (though the tutorial I am working on focuses on using emmet as well in the html section and this plugin will be a life-saver over my career as a web-bug hobbiest). CSS, though, is a bit more complicated but not in the sense of difficulty: CSS is complex because there is so much to do with it and in the 3 years I have been gone from looking into this stuff from w3schools.com (a decent and free web dev tutorial site I recommend you spend some time looking at), quite a few new things either came out or went over my head. CSS Grid, transition animations, pseudo selectors, these and many more concepts are completely new to me and yet they add a level of quality and completeness that I would expect to see on professional websites, things I didn’t know before but that now that I know them make me feel more prepared and better equipped to actually handle the oncoming world of web development.
…Of course if you are reading this before I put in my large scale site update, you are reading this from a very basic default website template with no little to no coloring, default font styling, size and placement, a lack of resources to ease your reading and exploration process and all other wonderful issues I have yet to address, so hearing me talk about an appreciation for a more presentable interface on a bland and lifeless canvas like this may seem hypocritical, but I have allocated my time where I wanted to. I want to learn material better before diving in 100%, that’s why I made this default site first, so that I had a goal to aspire to and a basic platform to post from that I could revisit when I became better equipped with the relevant skills. \ \ I’m on my way.
As For The Other Topic Today, Its Time For Me To Become Reacquainted With My Least Favorite Hobby: Fitness
Running straight out of the gates with a statement like the above really does make me sound like a pretentious snob, typical geek, or both, but the truth is I should have a decent amount of appreciation for “fitness,” but the truth is fitness has barely ever made me happy.
I have been running cross country for most of my teenage through adult life (though considerably less in my recent adult life) and even did some considerable weight training in my time. I even got a personal trainer who, during my most focused period, put me through a rigorous hypertrophy routine that eventually had me lifting 3 sets of 15 maxes at 155 bench, 195 squats and 205 deadlifts (I never did 1 set maxes, the idea behind it was very show-offy and didn’t seem productive towards my goals, but in fairness I don’t think my 1 set maxes would have been too impressive either.) This certainly isn’t a huge amount but for someone who has spent their entire life building a body frame with the sole purpose of moving over a long distance, to switch that around to a fairly built frame capable of lifting a more appreciable amount of weight, it was gratifying to see I had a lot more control over my body than I realized.
Double this sense of not matching up with what others are doing with a lifetime of feeling relatively self conscious about how I look and this is a recipe for a lack of appreciation for “fitness.” I don’t like how I look and for the majority of my life I haven’t liked what I look like except for a brief period during the peak of my weight training. I had just bought 2 new shirts that were just a bit small for me and some new shoes. I went to get dinner with my friend and on the way in, he paused and told me “you know I haven’t seen you in a bit but you have been working out, I can see it in your arms and your shoulders. You look good.”
While I certainly had been growing comfortable with my own appearance and growing into myself, to have a pat on the back from a life long friend was able to see my progress made all the difference.
Unfortunately, I stopped going to the gym and working with my trainer for financial reasons, time commitment reasons and pure laziness, which is where we are at today. I remember when I was at college and the term “freshman 15” was being thrown around all over the place. I think with the 3 months of self-isolation I have put myself in has given me the opportunity to really see what that is like.
[At some point in the future I will put pictures here of some mirror selfies I took to document my beginning.]
I am currently at the highest weight I have ever been, just shy of 180 lbs and about 15 lbs over where I was at my strongest, 165 lbs of mean lean running and lifting machine turned into a slightly blob-like, squishy mess.
I don’t like it.
Time to change that.
Without further beating around the bush, the goal is as follows:
Get myself back down to 165 lbs by the equinox (AKA September 21st) S̶o̶ ̶I̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶ ̶f̶a̶c̶e̶ ̶m̶y̶ ̶m̶o̶r̶t̶a̶l̶ ̶n̶e̶m̶e̶s̶i̶s̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶b̶r̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶b̶a̶l̶a̶n̶c̶e̶ ̶b̶a̶c̶k̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶r̶e̶a̶l̶i̶t̶y̶ so I can feel comfortable with myself again and be fit in the event a vaccine comes out and I can head out into the wilderness again without putting potential strain on emergency services. \ \ The plan is as such:
Workout Plan:
During this “warmup fortnight” I will be running Monday Wednesday Saturday for 30 minutes, 30 minutes, 50 minutes respectively. Each of these workouts will be followed with a body weight workout as I don’t have weights at home and the gyms are/should be shut down due to covid-19. The beginning routine will look something like this:
40 crunches\ 20 pushups\ 40 crunches\ 20 wide pushups \ 40 crunches\ 20 diamond pushups
This is a basic core/upper body workout plan I saw online and decided it was good enough for where I was, where I am going and what I need at this point in time: a solid foundation to start doing some better workouts from.\ \ After 2 weeks I’ll start running every day except Sunday, just like I did in high school.The workouts will still be every other day and there will of course be nice warm-up/cool-down and stretch exercises so I don’t injure myself, but I think this is a solid beginning that should at least help me lose weight if not gain a little muscle.\ \ When gyms open up I’ll consider going again but to be honest I really don’t like going to the gym unless its to work with a trainer. (Wah wah wah wah more complaining) so depending on where I am, I will consider my next steps, but there is one more side to this to add:\ \ Nutrition:\ \ I’m going to keep this part simple but effective based on my minimal understanding of what is a good strategy in nutrition. That is based on the following:
1800 kCal/Day\ **200 grams of protein/day**\ “more” vegetables and fruit\ “fewer” carbs\ no beer\ less dessert\ less to no red meat\ more vegetarian alternatives\ and\ 4 liters of water
All of the above are reasonable save for the combination of 200 grams of protein/day and 1800 calories. This is difficult to do, I know from experience, and it requires protein additives in order to accomplish this (protein shakes, protein bars, etc.) I am putting the protein in asterixes because at the moment my goal is to lose weight not gain muscle. Certainly I will probably gain a bit on my way back to where I was but the truth is that it is hard to both lose weight and gain muscle at the same time, especially for someone like me who is just getting back into it. So, I’m being lenient with myself, I’ll do what I can to limit my intake, make sure its better quality, and then see where that simple strat takes me. \ \ I’ll record what I can when I can in terms of daily weight, food and water consumption, time ran and maybe reps of crunches/pushups/pullups or something, but other than that I don’t want to put too much time into this other than improving my general health and getting back in shape. I have a bajillion other tasks to do and some I have let atrophy over time, but one thing I need to keep reminding myself about is that the longer you put off your health, the less time you have to fix it and the less time you have overall. I want to stick around for a while to annoy everyone however I can and its hard to do that if I’m dead in the ground from heart disease or if I am stuck in a chair because I let myself go.\ \ Godspeed everyone.
Written by Thomas Ogden, a hobbiest who dabbles in a lot of random junk.