Writing Pt. 3

He flitted in and out of consciousness.  Each time, the world shone a little less brighter through his eyelids.  However, the pain lingered through his dreams.  His subconscious brought him to the outskirts of the burning town.  There stood no place where the flames didn't rise several feet into the air.

The guilt of the destruction his actions wrought upon the town pushed him to walk into the flames, toward the town square.  Everywhere he looked, the scared and scornful looks of all the residents drilled deep into his soul.  Walking past each one, his shame grew and grew, until he wished with his whole being that death would save him from it.

The world started rocking around the man, so he burst into a run.  As the street he was on opened into the city square he knew so well, he expected to find the shallow pool drained of all liquid.  As he slowed down and approached the lip carved with all of the names of the past mayors of the city, he was surprised to find that the water stretched infinitely downward.

He spun around to the voice of an elderly, female voice, represented by an unclear specter.  "Let the guilt go.  Take the plunge and purge yourself of everything holding you back right now."

The man stood dazed, not knowing what to do.  The specter chuckled softly and said, "It's alright.  I'll give you a hand."  Before he could react, the figure pushed him backward into the pool.  As the cool water washed over him, he made the transition from unconscious to conscious again.  This time, he found himself sitting up in darkness, breathing heavy and sweating.

"Shhh shhh shhh, relax," the voice from his dream whispered.  "It's not yet your time to die."

6 Month Quest

Inspired by the main blog that I follow, Nerd Fitness, I am going to begin a 6-month quest.  Now, I've already stumbled.  I intended to begin this on July 1st, and have it end on December 31st.  However, I'm just going to recover from my stumble and start on the right foot.  This quest will begin today, 7/8/2014, and end January 7th, 2015.  I'll do an overview of what I accomplished then.

This quest will revolve around self-improvement of my whole life.  My body, my mind, and where they overlap, what I'll call my spirit.  I'll outline what I'm going into this quest intending to improve.  I expect that this will change as the months go on.

Body: 

One of the things I've been focusing most on recently has been the welfare of my body.  Over the past several months, I have gone from not working out and eating horrible lunches, to going to the gym 2-3 times a week.   As of this morning, I'm 212 pounds with what the scale says is 28% body fat.  Doing some simple math, that puts me at 59.36 pounds of protective casing covering my body.  That is quite a bit extra to be carrying around.  It's going to be a huge focus on dropping this down.

Stats:

Here are my weightlifting stats right now.  All I'll be looking for in this is an improvement, as I don't understand enough how I'd improve to give a realistic goal.

Bench: 145 lbs.

Shoulder Press: 80 lbs. 

Deadlift: 75 lbs.

Lat Pulldown: 105 lbs.

Row: 125 lbs.

Squat: 80 lbs.

In 36 minutes (30 minutes of activity plus 3 minutes warmup and 3 minutes cooldown), I can get 2.75 miles.

For the Fitness test, I fail out at 8:00 minutes.

My sitting heart-rate is 72 bpm.

Goal: 

My long term goal is going to be to drop down to 9% body fat.  After doing some more math, going by the numbers above and assuming I don't lose or gain muscle, I'm going to need to drop 44 pounds of fat to make this happen.  Optimistically, this is safely doable in the next six months.  The maximum recommended weight loss is 2 pounds a week.  However, I'm going to take into account holidays, delicious family dinners, and other unforeseen factors, and set my goal to be at 20% body fat by the end of this year.  That will require me to only drop 21.45 pounds of fat.  For reference, that's a little more than two and a half gallons of water that I'm carrying around on my body all the time.

Approach:

Here's how I'm going to approach this.  First, in regard to my exercise plan, I'm going to work on kicking up my workouts to 5 days a week.  I'll still be strength training 2-3x a week, but for the rest of the time I'm going to put a heavy emphasis on cardio.  Strength wise, I'm squatting 85 pounds 3x10, benching 150 pounds 2x10 + 1x10 @ 145, and in one 35 minute period, I alternated jogging 5 minutes and walking one minute, and manage to complete 2.75 miles.  Dietary wise, I'm going to work more on calorie replacement.  I've cut back my sweets a lot and my fats a little bit, but I can do much better.  On top of my daily lunch salads, I'd like to decrease the calories of my dinner and make sure they revolve more around vegetables and lean meats instead of cheeses and heavy carbs.  I'll work on documenting my diet a lot more, and then making tweaks where I see fit.  Go science!

Mind:

It took me awhile to decide what would be categorized as my mind.  I've come up with what I'm training in Lumosity, and crystal memory (What I know).  This will be a lot looser, as I haven't decided strict goals in this area.  As I work on the spirit portion of my quest, and understand my mind better, I will come up with my goals and approach more clearly.  As for now, my goal is to improve my BPI in Lumosity, finish my machine learning class, and take at least one more class.  I'm also not sure if this belongs here, but I'd like to work more on my writing.  Having confidence in myself and just getting stuff done.  More on this in the future.

Spirit:

This is where I'm hoping the most noticeable changes that might be viewed by others would occur.  Spiritually, I'm not very in-tune with myself.  I have plenty of processes that are inefficient, and my mind is usually uneasy/unfocused.  I'm going to work on mainly on attempting to understand myself better, and to improve on developing good and healthy habits.  This is also more or less undefined, but I do have an approach.

Approach:

Weekly, I'd like to work on a process.  At the beginning of each week, I'd like to meditate and determine which of my most commonly used processes could be evaluated.  I'd like to make a move toward thinking about how I do things, in order to determine if they are the best for me.  As the week goes through, I'd like to formulate a new way of doing the process, if I think that a new way would work out better.  Finally, at the end of the week, or during the next week, I'd like to reflect on the change and see if I want to keep my process the same.  

Writing Pt. 2

The man dropped to his knees, under the weight of the sun's scorching beam.  It was low in the sky, but that didn't seem to help with anything.  The man looked into the distance, and saw on the horizon the tiny speck that was his goal.  He allowed himself to fall forward onto his hands.  He ignored the burning of the sand on his palms.  Sweat streamed from his face into sand, where it evaporated in seconds.  Like his will, it was leaving his body, without any way that he knew of getting it back.

He completely detested suicide.  It was a cheap way of removing yourself from your problems.  However, when did giving up and allowing yourself die change from suicide to death by dehydration?  Was he committing suicide by allowing his body to collapse now?  Did it matter what the root cause of it was, if the fact remained that he'd be long dead before anyone found him?

With labored effort, he pushed himself back onto his knees, and opened his arms to the sun.  Wishing that the sun was feeding him energy instead of sapping it away, he allowed himself to stay like this for a couple minutes.  Eventually, he made his decision.  He determined that he had passed the line, and he was fine with it.  He allowed himself to fall onto his back, slowly closed his eyes, and let exhaustion overtake him.

Awakening

So, I lucid dreamt last night.  Side note, auto-correct is telling me that dreamt is no longer a word xD.  Here's my story though.

I vaguely remember the things before it.  My buddy MattDave told me an important lesson, but I either forgot what it was or I didn't grasp the meaning of it.  That happens often.  He has such great wisdom but I find myself getting lost.

I was in a school.  Probably symbolizing the metaphysics school that my friend Levi was telling about.  And within (Where I was doing the learning, it was where I met MattDave as well), I eventually met someone I went to school with who asked me if my siblings and I wanted to go over to her place for the 4th of July.  I told her no.  These things are actually unimportant and I'll skip them.  Eventually, one of my old friends from Altoona asked me a question about my lucidity.  I responded that I was completely lucid, but to question myself.

I walked into the night, out of the school, mulling over this.  Confused.  It was then that I questioned why there was a Target next to the school.  Both the school and Target disappeared, and it instantly transitioned into day.

I was left to talk with Kayla.  I meditated on ways to make life better, and discovered that I am unpleased with where I'm at now in life.  I am staying at my job, which I'm capable of doing but not enjoying, out of a sense of loyalty. We lost a teammate, and so the team is pretty much spread thin as it is.  I am realizing I am coming to enjoy it.  I'm not sure if I'm just not comfortable with working in general.

That's a place holder for a different discussion.  The other key point was that I tried very hard to fly.  I wanted Kevin time to mull over those things.  That's where, struggling with flying, I found Superman.  Though he didn't say anything, I realized that the key to flying is not the velocity, it is simply the will.  I will fill that in later.  It's time to actually wake up in real life and begin my run.

Note to self

To everyone else, I'm sorry, but this will sound weird.  But I'm in an era of change, and this is the only way it will happen.

KEVIN: LISTEN TO YOURSELF.

Step 1: Experience
Step 2: Notation
Step 3: Meditate
Step 4: Review
Step 5: Decide
Step 6: Update

Random Quote

Remember:


The reason most major goals are not achieved is that we spend our time doing second things first.

- Robert J. Mckain, writer

Physical Update

So, working on updates: I went to the gym yesterday (Totally all on my own accord, because I wanted to run, w00t!).  Moved up to 17.5 minutes of jogging consecutively, with a hard run at the end for the last minute.  Ahead of where I want to be.



My current training strategy for running: I'm going to try to move up a couple minutes more per every 2 runs, up to my goal of 30 minutes consecutively.  When I get there, I'm going to begin to up my pace.  Every day I run, I'm going to try to go 0.1-0.2 miles per hour faster.  I'll do this until I get to 6.7mph.  After that, I'm going to slowly increase the incline until its at about 6 degrees.


When I get here, I should be able to do a 5k in 30 minutes.  A bit more if it has obstacles.  This won't be my stopping point though.  This is my just first set of goals.  I'll redefine them as I go along.