I am tired.
A lot physically tired, a little tired of getting run into the ground at work, VERY tired of this election, frustrated-tired of the stupid plateau I hit with my weight, tired of just having no time to do anything except work out, work, and sleep.
And the latter of which I really don’t have as much time to do as I’d like. Which is why I’m dragging myself to bed right now. Whee!
Prep is always pretty brutal. Trying to formulate a system to get everyone all the information they need, figuring out exactly what information they actually do need, and even simply trying to get a grip on who the fuck everyone is before we start shooting is a time-consuming and exhausting process.
Adding onto that the increasingly Herculean task of dragging myself to the gym an absolute minimum of 4 days a week to try and keep the weight loss going, and time for damn near anything starts to evaporate.
And of course, only in my world is it a problem that this is all happening as almost every show on television starts to premiere. Sure, I have a terabyte of storage space on the big TiVo, but I want to watch everything noooooooow. And by everything, I mean the 30+ hours of crap I plan to record every single week.
All in all, I just need the days to be longer. As much as the prep process sucks, I like my job. And the working out has left me feeling physically better than I have in a long time. But I need more sleep, and I could really use some more time to myself during the week.
Alas, for now, I’ll just keep rolling along, taking the occasional Saturday off the gym and then deciding to make up for it by doing a gym triathlon on Sunday. And sleeping like a hibernating bear on the weekends.
I went for a looooooong bike ride today. I wanted to do the entire Marvin Braude trail, but I came up a little short.
The entire trail is 22 miles each way, and I have to bike 2 miles each way to get to the trail. If I’d done the whole thing, I would have gone 48 miles.
Instead, I went all the way to the South end, about two miles south of the Redondo Beach pier. This was about 5 miles South of where I stopped the last time I rode the trail, which was a significantly larger gap than I had realized, so I was a lot more tired by the time I reached the South end when I thought.
The wind was whipping pretty good coming back North, so I think that’s part of what tired me out so much. I think I also need to bring more than a granola bar along to refuel.
I wasn’t really hungry per se, but I noticed I got a lot more tired than I did during my last ride that far South, during which my friends and I stopped for brunch. Pancakes and Guinness are apparently a far more efficient fuel than one wee granola bar.
But I managed to get all the way back to the Santa Monica pier, which is just over 18 miles north of Redondo (and about 3/4 of a mile north of where I got on) before my the combination of the setting sun and my body saying “GET OFF THE BIKE!” determined that I should probably head home.
I wound up breaking down and buying a comically overpriced 20oz Gatorade at the S.M. pier, and I felt WAY better after that, so perhaps I shall invest in some for my next ride.
However, I did 39 miles total, which is nothing to sneeze at, and about 80% of the entire way. We’ll see how many of my limbs I can actually move tomorrow, but for right now, I’m pretty happy I managed to go as far as I did.
When I was swimming while I was in Idaho, I thought maybe the pool might be a little longer than the pool at my gym, since it was taking me a solid six minutes longer to finish 100 lengths than it had been at my gym.
The folks at the pool in Idaho swore up and down that their pool was 25 meters. The folks at my gym swore up and down when I asked them this afternoon that their pool is also 25 meters, even though it felt noticeably shorter than the one in Idaho.
So, there are three possibilities:
Frankly, I think option 2 is the most likely, given that at my pace the 6 extra minutes it was taking me to finish in Idaho is about how long it takes me to swim the 214 meter difference between 2500 yards and 2500 meters.
How much of a tool would it make me if I showed up at the gym tomorrow with a measuring tape so that I can find out if I’ve actually been swimming 2500 meters or 2500 yards?
I went horseback riding today with my camera, the pictures that were not completely blurry are now up on Flickr. Western-style riding is ideal for this, since you only need to keep one hand on the reins at all times, instead of both (as you do when you ride English-style).
However, it is not ideal when your horse randomly decides to break into a trot coming down a hill and you have to try and pull hard enough to stop him with just one hand because the other holds your very expensive camera. That was fun.
By the way, remember how I said I was going out with the Old Fart Bike Brigade 2: Electric Jewgaloo? They’re in way better shape than the Atlanta crowd. I got totally dusted by four guys over the age of seventy biking up a looooong but gentle incline.
They even managed to go up one hell of a steep hill at the end. I took one look at the hill and said, “This is No Country For Young Whippersnappers.” My dad and one other guy agreed with me, and all three of us felt really old.
Went for a little ride with the Old Fart Bike Brigade: Atlanta Edition today. And when I say “a little ride”, I mean this nice 28 mile loop. I’m a little tired now.
While I did manage to do better than my dad (in his defense, he’s almost 72 and I’m 27), I was slightly dismayed to find that I was huffing and puffing to keep pace with a barely-breaking-a-sweat 65 year old prostate cancer patient.
I’m in better shape than I was, but I apparently still have a ways to go. We’ll see how I hold up Wednesday with Old Fart Bike Brigade 2: Electric Jewgaloo (aka the Wood River Jewish Community ride).
Vegas was a good news, bad news situation.
The bad news was that I lost $15 playing Roulette, because I never fucking remember that you have to have at least $100 to win squat at Roulette until I drop at least $10 in the frame of three minutes.
The good news was that I turned around and turned $20 into $60 off a blackjack-dealing Elvis impersonator. My mother was so proud when I told her (she, as you may or may not recall, is an insane Elvis fan).
The bad news was that I somehow managed to not notice that the ticket I’d bought to The Dark Knight was to a 35mm show, not an IMAX show, and the bulb on the projector was clearly on its last legs as well.
The good news was that The Dark Knight was still so unbelievably, jaw-droppingly fantastic that now I’m happy I have an excuse to see it again, and in even more brain-meltingly awesome IMAX.
Anyway, I meandered up here to Sun Valley on Friday, and then have been enjoying showing my dad and stepmom my new personality as an insane exercise addict.
I did 2500 meters in the pool and a six mile bike ride. Well, really, a three mile downhill cruise and a three mile lung-punishing climb, to be more accurate. Actually, both bits were pretty lung-punishing, as I’d forgotten how much thinner the air is here than in L.A.
I also have a nice little strip of sunburn right above my left eyebrow to show for my troubles, in the space between the top of the eyebrow and the bottom of my swim cap. Let me tell you, it is an attractive look.
But my level of relaxation is reaching critical mass. Tomorrow’s plan includes a four mile walk, more swimming, and a screening of Mamma Mia. The latter was my stepmom’s idea, as my feelings on that musical/film are well summed up by a quote from the movie The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert:
“NO MORE BLOODY ABBA!”
Noted: 35 miles is kind of a long way to bike.
Also, I need a better seat. Ow.
First, your distance calculator decides that I’m running a thirteen minute mile.
If I could run on a treadmill without incurring extreme pain, I feel like it would be maybe an eight or nine minute mile. Nothing to write home about, but certainly not as horrifyingly slow as a 13 minute mile.
Then, you arbitrarily reset sometime after I’ve gone a mile and a half into the 3.1 miles I need to finish my gym triathlon, and I have no idea how much further I have to go.
I wound up doing another mile and a half after I noticed it had reset and still coming in at 1:59, but I probably could have made it to 1:55 if I had actually known how far I’d gone in the few minutes between when I saw I’d crossed 1.5 miles and when I noticed it had reset.
Bah. I’ll probably do one more of these before I try my Batshit Crazy Plan of doing a full Olympic-length gym triathlon during the Olympics. That’ll be double the distance I’ve been doing, and will therefore probably take about four hours.
At least I was able to verify that I’ve dropped my swim time to just over 15 minutes to do 15 laps from just over 18 minutes to do 15 laps. Yay, progress!
A few bits of errata, Laz style:
– Because we were on a Wednesday-Sunday shooting schedule, I had taken to calling each day “Fake ____”. Like Wednesday was Fake Monday, Thursday was Fake Tuesday, Friday was Fake Wednesday.
Today, the last day I have to deal with this shift, I found a flaw in my cunning plan: I forgot that it was Fake Wednesday, not real Wednesday, and that therefore the aqua aerobics class would be taking over the pool at 9 instead of 9:30, and got kicked out of the pool halfway through my laps.
– Are you really really bored? Try to identify the candy bar simply by looking at a cross-section. I went 14 for 20.
– I am extremely excited to see Wall-E tomorrow. Almost as excited as I am to actually have a Saturday off.
–Our entertainment this evening was chasing the mouse that lives in the kitchen all over the office. My PA was taking videos of this with his cellphone, one of which has me saying in the background, “Well, the mystery guy who lost his clothes finally called back.”
No, I will not be posting these videos.
–We finally finished shooting!
This has been a fun show, and a very good learning experience. The shifted week thing has been an absolute bear, but at least it was only for three weeks. I pulled a couple sixth-day paychecks, which is helpful in the realm of “Mama needs a new pair of everything.”
I’m back to a normal schedule for the next couple weeks (well, I’ll be in for a couple hours Sunday, but nothing like my schedule previous sundays of 5pm-5am), and then I’m scrambling for a new job. Gotta love the freelance world!