Tag Archives: Fitness

Still looking for my voice…

After nearly a decade you would think I’d have found my voice for this blog. Having changed the focus so many times doesn’t help much I suppose. Personal blog, business blog, aviation focus, woodworking focus, I mean, really… how many times have I twisted this thing into something I needed/wanted at the moment? I’ve lost count.

I don’t know if I will ever know what my blog voice is. I do know, I need to write more frequently if I ever want to find that voice. March 28th, 2018 is marked down on the calendar as my 10th Blogaversary. The family and I have a lot of big changes in our lives taking place between now and March. I am hopeful that I will at least have a whisper if not a voice by then.

Big changes? First and foremost, we are moving. Not just across town, to another state. I say this because I have always lived in the San Francisco Bay Area. 50 years and the only time I wasn’t living in the area was a six month period I lived and worked on a job-site in Stockton, less than two hours from here. In fact, the family and I have been living in the same apartment for over 21 years.

Beginning July 1st, we will be in transition to our new-to-us house in Klamath Falls, Oregon. New town, new state, new house, new jobs; big changes. I haven’t lived in a house in 40 years, Tammy hasn’t lived in a house in almost 30. I am very excited about these changes. We want to shift to a more sustainable lifestyle and getting out of the multi-million populated urban sprawl and moving to a city of fewer than thirty-thousand people is a great start. We will be looking for our forever-homestead after we get up to KF and have had a chance to get to know the area.

Another change for us is the earnest desire to get outdoors and go do things. Sightsee, hike, canoe, just get out in nature, which will be interesting since none of us have lived in an area it snows, or rains a lot. It will take some time to acclimate to the area and its weather.

So you can see, there will be a lot of subject matter potential for the blog and writing in general. I am not making any commitments right now, but I would like to see myself post at least 500 words at least once a week. That seems like a reasonable goal. I am also looking forward to more interesting photographic subject matter to be included in the posts.

Along with all of the changes in lifestyle and location, we are hoping to make a few changes internally. With all of the out-and-about, we will be working on getting more physically fit, and tuning into the new, smaller, less frantic world around us. One of the reasons I don’t go out much anymore is the crush of people everywhere we go. I have to tune out so much background noise just to get from point A to point B. When you think about it, it’s easy to see why people seem to have lost their sense of self-preservation. They tune out so much around themselves, they just don’t see or hear it coming.

When you think about it, it’s easy to see why people in urban areas seem to have lost their sense of self-preservation. They tune out so much around themselves, they just don’t see or hear it coming. The density of it all accelerates the environments natural selection, adaptations, and migrations. An interesting idea for a sociology hypothesis… later.

My only regular outing is going to Volunteer Examiner sessions for Amateur Radio license exams on the first and third Saturday of the month. On more than a few occasions, I have not left the property we manage between VE sessions. If I don’t need something or have been asked to help someone, I would rather just stay on-site. My current density adaptation is to isolate/insulate when possible.

Not healthy, physically or otherwise. Socializing has followed the same lines, aside from the internet, I only see the folks at VE, or chat with other hams on the radio. Radio will still be my main social outlet, but I am looking forward to participating in things with actual people, not just internet friends or disembodied voices.

Any way you slice it, there are some big changes in store for our family. I for one am looking forward to some change with open eyes, mind, and arms. Klamath Falls… bring it on!

Until next time,
~FlyBoyJon

Fitness – Mind, Body, & Soul

In my quest to be one of those old guys working from a nearly forgotten airfield out in the middle of nowhere, restoring aircraft thought lost forever to the ravages of time, I have been restoring myself, bring the old crate up to date.

We Can Do ItOf course there is school, and degrees are important after a fashion, but the real meat and potatoes education was from flight school, soon from AMT school, and there will be other schools too as I move forward eventually earning some sheepskin. If only one thing were true about aviation it would be that you are never really “out of school”, it’s a lifelong commitment to learning, maybe not in the classroom, but still a lot of learning.

This post is not so much about the continuous pursuit of knowledge in all things aeronautical, no this post is about personal growth, and like the never ending commitment of aviation, personal growth is a lifelong exploration as well.

While preparing for this career path, I committed to making some changes in my life. I am a big guy, always have been always will be, but there is a lot of room for improvement. Over in the sidebar you may notice a Health and Fitness tab and under that tab a box, today that box reads 37 pounds lost. At 323 pounds, I am at my lowest weight in nearly two decades, but there is a long way still to go. Ultimately I am shooting for 200, which by the way would be my lowest weight since elementary school. I wrestled when I was in Jr. High in the 280+ weight class.

A big part of this has been altering my way of thinking. I have had to replace an ill conceived thought process about what “waste” and “saving” are. This old, mental attitude invoked hording and stockpiling impulses making me think that a filled plate or a filled garage was was a good thing. This thought process could have been applied to nearly anything. “If I don’t take it all now, I might not have the chance later” it’s just wrong headed. One step in the process has been learning to let go of perfectly good clothing that just doesn’t fit, too big or too small, it doesn’t matter. With the frequent changes in size, most of my clothes come from a second-hand store these days anyway so even if I rotated my entire wardrobe annually it would be at a pretty low cost and I donate cloths back when they no longer fit.

While I’m on the subject of clothes; anyone who has known me since high school can tell you I very rarely went out without some sort of loose over-shirt, sweater or jacket of some kind. It could have been 120 in the shade and I would most likely have had a jacket on. This was totally a body image thing that I have struggled with my whole life. I am still a big guy and still have those body image moments once in a while. Since the beginning of 2011 when I started this weight loss plan I have been going out in t-shirts, in public, with lots of people around! For most of you this may not sound like a big deal but this was a huge mental shift for me. I am not planning on running around in a speedo any time… well… ever, and I apologize for the image, but being free from the self imposed torment of jackets and flannel during the summer swelter is very liberating.

All of this freedom to go out into the world makes it much easier to get out and exercise which is of course helping shift my body chemistry along with the dietary changes. Lower blood pressure, faster pulse recovery, longer endurance, less pain, no insomnia, no depression, the list of quality-of-life improvements seems to grow longer every day.

With AMT school starting in 51 days (yes, I am counting) I’m looking forward to seeing how this new healthier me does in the study department.

There are always more things to do and ways to improve. In my case, the slow and steady application of change works well and I look forward to a regular cycle of New & Improved editions of me.

Until next time, blue skies and tail winds,

~FlyBoyJon

life on campus…

Back in January I made some decisions about major changes in my life. I know that making more than one big change in life(style) has consequences and it usually makes it more difficult to succeed in any of the proposed areas of change. Having this information going into this year I set up several goals for myself.

First off was the decision to pursue my aviation career whole-heartedly. I have a large and complex design of what that means, but this is not the forum to go into great detail on that, let’s just say that much of it comes down to credibility, and developing that credibility. Step one is to do the traditional credibility builder and get that sheepskin.

For me the sheep skin includes finishing a distance learning program I started in 2006 for an AS in Aviation Operations, second is to go back to school full time while still working the day job. I enrolled in classes back in January for a GE AA at San Jose City College that fulfills transfer requirements to San Jose state where I intend to earn a BS then MS in Aeronautical/Aerospace Engineering.

Another big change/goal is to get back on the weight loss train and get down to a weight more acceptable for a test pilot and competitor in aerobatics competitions. I set up an ambitious but very doable plan to loose 150 pounds in a about two and a half years, 60/50/40 ponds a year respectively. To do this I am using the calorie counting method.

So far school is going well as is the weight loss. I have a mid-term 4.0 at San Jose City College, and I just wrapped my first quarter with a 15 pound weight loss. I am tracking weight loss success by quarter rather than daily or by month, it seems more practical.

What has not gone so well is that I have not been getting as much done on the day job as I would like. School has been taking up much more time than I had anticipated, mostly due to the way I scheduled classes. This is something I can fix relatively easily. Changing my schedule next term and knowing how much time I need for study I will be able to make better use of my time.

Another goal that has not gone as well as planned involves building the Volksplane. It has been several weeks since I last posted here and it has been longer since any work was done on the airplane. I have been keeping up with my time-cards which points out vary clearly just how poorly I have been doing in this area. Frustrating yes, but I am not stressing out on this one, I know life happens and I know I am trying to do a lot all at once, so this is not a huge surprise. With any luck this too will be fixed with my scheduling changes next term.

Things that have just not happened are, getting up much earlier consistently to get personal stuff done and any last minute homework before classes, and going for daily walks and stretching. I also toyed with the idea of starting ether yoga or Ti Chi as part of the early morning regimen. Here again, not all that stressed out. These were set out as part of the over-all move towards getting fit. As long as the weight loss continues, I have time to add these in as I get closer to my goal weight.

As you can see, I am 2 for 6 as of now. It is still early though, the second quarter of the first year of a ten-year plan has just begun. All things considered, I am pleased with how things are shaping up. I hope to have my goal ratio up to 4 of 6 by the end of this year.

There are still lots of things in motion and school is a very fluid thing, being engaged with three institutions and having opportunities from outside my major come up keeps the decision making cycle in high gear. Right now the major stress is figuring out the particulars.

As Cornelius Robinson would say “Keep moving forward!”

Until next time, blue skies and tail winds,
~FlyBoyJon

Where is he going with this?

Taking NoteA fair question, indeed.

When I started this iteration of the website as a blog in March of 2008, the idea was to use it as a personal site only. Later it migrated to an idea of a purely commercial/organizational site, and has morphed into several variations since. In the most recent morph, I closed down a couple of other sites, redirected them to this site and cross-posted the entries from those sites here. Sounds like a mess, doesn’t it? I spent a lot of time on this site planing and preparing for this grand Aviation Adventure program (which I have not given up on, by the way) that was to become my primary focus professionally. Due to many circumstances, that plan has not born any fruit.

This post is a “clear the air” article, more for me than anyone else, though it may contain tidbits useful to others. I wanted to put the new plans out there for the universe to see, and to be a personal motivator and reference point.

Shortcomings in personality have much to do with the lack of forward motion on several plans for the site. I am a born puppeteer leader. I lead from the wings, not on stage. Getting things done is much easier for me if there is a “face man” to motivate the masses and sell the product. I am a skilled sales person and I do have the interpersonal skills to get the job done, I just don’t like to be the face man. I can do the jobs of a good sized team in the background; just don’t throw me out on stage and things will work out fine. This is my biggest hurdle in getting projects moving forward. This is also a contributing factor in this most recent change of direction.

The last few posts have been about me, not just in the subject sense but in the personal sense, and this is part of the new direction I am moving to with this site. It is a change of perspective and attitude, to view the adventures more the way I see them. The plan then is to do the adventure stuff but approach it from the back stage perspective. Go through the planing, plotting and set up, then into the training phase, on to the execution, and the grand finale, the post production documentation phase. With this perspective I will be able to do and share all of the things I love, the planing, training, adventure, and production.

As much as I would love to start building that Nieuport right away, that just aint gonna happen. As a kid I was never in shape; I was an active person, I was just an active fat person. Over the years, I have abused my body with long hours, little sleep and lots of burst activities. The kinds of things that put high strain on the body. Now, as I reach for middle age, I realize there are a lot of things I miss doing that are adventures in and of themselves. I want to get myself in better physical condition to do some of the more infrequently done adventures. One thing I have wanted to do most of my life is fly around the world as pilot in command (PIC). To do that I need to be in good physical condition, certainly better condition than I am now.

So, this is where the adventures begin. I am embarking on a physical fitness program, still in development, that is my first adventure. This change in direction began with the 5k my wife and I participated in a week ago, and moved forward in the preparation of yesterdays article on shoes. Last night I plotted out a 5k through my neighborhood and that is my new training ground, until I bump it up to a 10k.

This is the beginning of my basic fitness program. As I put together more of a program I will put up a Basic Fitness page to elaborate on what I am doing in that arena. At present, the first Adventure, with a capital A, will most likely be the Skyline To The Sea trail, from Skyline down into Big Basin State Park. As soon as I get more on the planing of that trip I will start the Adventure page. As I accumulate more Adventures, I will sort them out a bit, but the blog will contain posts about all.

Monetization is where the biggest change in plan for the site takes place. I had always planned for the site to be monetized, it was originally intended to be very early in the game. Now that element is taking a back seat. I plan on acquiring sponsors and selling advertising at some point. For now that is an incidental, not a driving factor. This is a huge shift in the sites initial concept. Where it was originally money driven, it is now a personal thing. Don’t get me wrong, I will be pimping the site in short order, it just wont be the driving force. I think that this change in attitude about the site will help to over come my personal obstacles about being the face man.

One Runs, One Walks

walking_shoeToday was a good day.

Today I participated in The Dream Mile 2009 for the Bay Area. I am not a runner, by any stretch of the imagination, I don’t do running. I do walk though. As a kid I remember walking in the March of Dimes Walk-a-thons on a regular basis. As a scout, I did hike and backpack, including a 50 mile back pack trip when I was around 16 or 17. My “job” on all of the backpacking trips was to be the Pace Setter, because I was the slowest. During my scouting carrier I became very knowledgeable in the signs, symptoms, treatment and prevention of heat exhaustion.

I am a big guy, I always have been a big guy. In high school I weighed over 280 pounds. I say over because I am not sure how much over I was at the time; the schools scales topped out at 275. My first summer out of high school I went to a Marine Corps recruiting station to find out about signing up with the Corps, I went through much of the recruiting processing, which came to a screeching halt when the scales reveled I was 315 pounds. The recruiters said they could get me into “fat camp” if I got down to 280 on my own, and boot camp would get me the rest of the way down to my expected weight. Looking back I would say that was unrealistic, but hey they are recruiters right?

Fast forward 20 something years to 2004-2005, my wife was unhappy about her weight and decided to do something about it. She joined Weight Watchers, and did amazingly well! She lost 125 pounds! Inspired by her early successes and tenacity I changed my diet a little and participated with her, sort of. I was supportive and encouraging to her efforts, just not doing it myself. I did actually manage to lose some weight. After a few months we got a scale that went higher than 250, I started “tracking” my weight, and weighed in at 361 pounds. As of this writing I am at 329 which, for those of you paying attention, is only 14 pounds more than I was in high school.

Over the years I have acquired reference points in my weight; they begin with my first tracked weight a few years ago, the “Holy Crap!” weight; Now I am getting close to my “pilots license” weight of 325. My next checkpoint is “High School” weight which I am rounding to 300. Beyond that is my “Drivers License” weight, which was actually my wrestling weight class in Jr. High, 280. Keep in mind, I haven’t seen that 280 on a scale since 6th grade. After that, well, I’m not going to worry about it till I get below 300.

So how does all of this tie in together? I enjoyed doing the 5k walk today. I really enjoyed it. If I hadn’t developed a couple of blisters, I think I could have done the 10k, and I want to start doing these events on a regular basis. Today was my wife’s third run/walk and she is loving it. Though I do not seen myself running in these events, as she inevitably will, I do want to walk them.

In weight loss, it has been said that each person must come to there impetus in there own time, I don’t know if I have reached that point or not, but I do know that I have not felt this… I am not sure what word really fits the way I feel right now, accomplished is as close as I can get …I haven’t felt this accomplished and encouraged about myself since I completed that 50 mile backpack trip nearly 25 years ago.

~FlyBoyJon