The Arbitrary ChuckJerry

I have been trying to be healthy over this summer by being more careful with my diet and also trying to exercise consistently. I usually ride my bike or go rollerblading in this park by my house. Today I decided that I should jog instead of rollerblade just to work some different muscles and really get a gauge of my wind and such.

My goal was to run two miles intermittently between walking about a half mile or so. Rather than that I ran for three straight miles. I was enormously impressed with myself. We have a treadmill here and I ran on that through the winter. I went to get on it the other day and it was broken. It wouldn't turn on for some reason. On the treadmill I run a little faster and I usually can't go more than 1.5 miles at a time and I'm done.

Today I paced myself and got my tortoise on and didn't have any trouble completing the three miles. I'm not ready to run a marathon quite yet, but I didn't think I was capable of that minor feat. I'm going to have to set my goals higher for the end of the summer.

Between biking, rollerblading, and running, the biking is the easiest. I do that just to not sit around the house all day. If I go out for a couple hours and do 10-15 miles, then that's not a big deal. I feel like I could do 50 miles a day on the bike without much effort, though it might get boring.

Rollerblading is second, but there's much more effort involved than with biking. I'm really into efficiency when I rollerblade, so I put lots of effort into each kick and take probably half as many as most skaters. Also it's hard because you use those muscles on the outside of your legs and in your back that you don't use for many other things. When I rollerblade I'll do 6.5 miles only because that's the complete length of the track at the park by my house.

Jogging isn't really hardest, per se, it's just pretty boring. There's no speed involved, there's nothing really fun about it, it's just exercising for the sake of exercising. I guess it's the best for you, but it can't be that much better as an aerobic endeavor than rollerblading is, which is at least more fun in terms of speed and what not.