I'm doing it all wrong. If all those productivity bloggers on the internet are right, I should be spending more time meditating, reading Marcus Aurelius, and eating a vegan (or at least vegetarian) diet. I should have taken my family to some foreign country (while packing as few items as possible and staying in Airbnbs rather than some corporate hotel) instead of spending a week strolling through the various Disney World Parks. The fact that all those bloggers are just reading each other and attempting to build a brand and business around their own variation of the secret sauce for living a productive and happy life (which almost invariably include meditation, minimalism, and not eating meat) detracts a bit from the power of their interrelated and inbred ideas. It's not that their ideas are necessarily bad, they're just redundant and boring. Except for their promotion of reading. Reading is a great way to improve your life. I can always get behind people reading more books.
Reading was not a big part of my life last week. My mini-bacchanal of eating whatever I wanted and generally just enjoying myself did not really include a significant amount of reading. I just didn't feel like it. I read a little, but I made no significant progress in either Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell or A Boy's Life. I really have no problem with that. I thought I might feel bad about not reading more, but I was content to just slip into the alternate reality of life in a Disney Resort. I was largely disconnected from my day to day reality. It was family and fun. I paid no attention to politics and gave passing notice to the sports world. I played lots of Mario Run (and now that I've completed all the most salient tasks in the game, I suspect that my desire to play will diminish).
I was very successful in ignoring the reality of my diet while in WDW. I didn't really worry about the caloric content or health consequences of anything that I ate. I figured this would be my last big chance to really enjoy my food for a little while. Eating tons of deserts and other junky foods for a week does a good job of satisfying cravings for that kind of food. It's easier to focus on eating right after spending so much time not worrying about it. I think I can make it to my summer vacation before I'll feel the need to really splurge. Hopefully I will drop a few pounds before I'm at the beach for a week towards the end of July. I was surprised to see that I didn't gain any weight last week when I summoned up the courage to step on the scale this morning. I guess walking around pretty much all day (I average over 23,000 steps) is a good counter to the less than stellar vacation diet.
Spending so much time in the close company of really obese people is also a good prod to take better care of myself. I have plenty of extra flesh around my mid-section, but my shirt hangs straight down from my chest. So many people in the park (men, women, and, most disturbingly of all, kids) have these huge guts. My big observation was that lots of fat makes men look like women and women look like men. There were so many people on motorized carts. It was depressing. I felt the same motivation that I had when I left the park last time to get my own diet and activity levels up so I can stay active and be in better shape the next time I visit the park. I have no desire to be limited in what I can do because my body prevents me from getting and having fun and enjoying myself.
I was definitely in better running shape this time than I was on our last visit. I was in the final stages of recovery from some calf issues that pretty much destroyed my running in 2014 during out last trip to WDW in January 2015. I managed to get in a couple of miles around the Animal Kingdom parking lot on that trip. I got in two runs this time. I did a 5K our first morning in the resort. We stayed in the Boardwalk Villas so there were some good running trails right outside the hotel. I didn't have to use the parking lot this time. I wasn't trying to kill myself, but I managed to run a negative split for each of the three miles. By the time Thursday rolled around I thought there was no way I would get in a decent run. My legs were so tired from being on my feet for pretty much the entire week. The fatigue was definitely present, but I managed to run 3.5 miles at a reasonable pace. That energy was gone by Saturday. I think it was more the emotional toll of being at the end of vacation as much as the physical effect of having walked around so much the previous seven days, but I just couldn't get myself out of bed to workout on Saturday morning.
My reentry into normal life has been as smooth as I could hope. I got out and ran Monday morning. My pace was the fastest it's been in awhile. I'm getting back to where I was pre-injury, at least on the 3.5 mile loops around my neighborhood. I need to start adding some distance to my runs on the weekend. I also made it to the gym despite having a meeting compressing my available workout time and tons of rain making the trip into the gym from the car less than ideal. It was a short workout but seeing that it was my first in over a week, I was fine with easing my way back in to the weights. I'm waiting to see if I get sore. I'm not really feeling anything as of now, but it usually takes a good 24 hours for the DOMS to really get going.
I successfully piloted two additional workouts in the week before we went on vacation. I squeezed in an extra 5000 m of rowing on Wednesday and two miles of running on Friday. Tomorrow will be my first attempt at the rowing without the benefit of my kids not needing to catch the bus. I would like to row before my kids get up, but it's much more likely that I will row after they are on the bus. We'll see how it goes tomorrow morning.
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