I just received word that my team at work will be on a 12-hour work day schedule Monday through Friday with a few weekends tossed in for good measure for the next two months or so, which puts a severe damper on my intention of giving Kim’s plan another more serious try. I got derailed from following through 100% with the program by the last work crunch for the Winx project, and it’s not going to be much better this time around.

Double gym sessions per day are out if I want to keep up with such plebeian endeavors as paying my bills, doing laundry, and preparing meals, so I am going back to a single one hour AM workout per day. I’m going to focus on consistency and quality in my diet and workouts over quantity.

One thing I’ve learned about myself in the past few months is that I don’t like exercising enough to want to do it twice in a day or for more than 45-60 minutes at a time.

There, I’ve said it.

I can be gung ho about twice-a-day workouts for a month or two even with a crunch time work schedule, but after that, the rest of my life starts to come apart. The house gets messy. I run out of clean clothes. Unwashed dishes in the sink develop their own ecosystems. My cats are lonely and chubby from lack of play time with Mommy Mags. My parents begin to leave pointed phone messages asking me if I can spare the time to visit this month.

Working out becomes a chore instead of the physical and mental catharsis it normally is for me.

Mind you, I am not saying that exercise is fun, because the acts of physically exerting myself, heaving for breath, and creaking through days of DOMS will never be synonymous with “fun” in my mind, but there is something very empowering about training your body to be faster, stronger, and better that makes all the sweat and sore muscles worthwhile.

I don’t like exercising to lose weight. That isn’t a good enough reason to go through what is fundamentally a series of unpleasant and uncomfortable physical sensations. I like exercising to improve myself and get ever closer to achieving my maximum potential. Just because I am actually a major geek doesn’t mean I want to look like one or take pride in being all brains and no brawn.

To be complete, I think I need to have both. ;)  I just need to cut back to more reasonable, sustainable amounts of exercise until I am back to regular work hours, which, I estimate, should be sometime around the next decade when I retire from the game industry and open my own health food bistro.