Tag Archives: walking

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

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.

Shoes

Walking ShoesShoes, shoes, shoes, shoes… shoes!

As a young kid I learned about foot care. I remember as a small child, going to the Buster Brown shoe store with my mom. The salesman at the store had been there for a long time and seemed to be much older than my mom, and I can remember him telling her about arch support and proper foot alignment and how important they where for a young child’s feet. This would have been somewhere around 1975.

Foot care took the spotlight again when I was a Boy Scout. One of my Scoutmasters regaled us with stories of the British troops and how important foot care was to the military; officers that had let foot problems develop were even court marshaled. Hmmm…. a dishonorable foot discharge… Anyway, It was made clear on many occasions that taking care of your feet on hiking trips was very important. I recall more than one instance where I, or another scout, had slacked on our foot care and regretted it most strongly.

Over the years it had just become a part of the routine to take care of my feet. When I was in search and rescue, I was often the one to remind some of the other team members about taking care of there feet. On several survival course trips I was one of the few that fared toward the top of the class. On more than one expedition I have been very thankful for my scouting experiences in foot care.

As I got older I took on responsibilities that did not require the durable footwear I had grown up using. I had also become so busy with work that weekends just turned into more workdays. The activities that I participated in, mostly Renaissance faires, required ‘alternative’ footwear and my work shoes were cheap seekers. I got out of the habit of taking care of my feet.

The last time I bought ‘good’ shoes was in 2002. I bought a pair of Wolverine work boots, and they were very comfortable, they fit well and offered a lot of ground shock absorption. Just what I needed at the time. As the years wore on, the boots slowly deteriorated, unfortunately for me, it was very slowly. I had grown attached to them and wore them all the time. I bought $10-20 shoes at Wal-mart or Target for general ware but the boots were the primary footwear. The cheap shoes usually lasted 6 months or less, compressing and becoming uncomfortable or just falling apart. Us big guys are hard on shoes, they break down on us rather quickly. The Wolverines had broken down but I hadn’t noticed until I realized that they were now causing foot problems.

After realizing that my boots were now causing problems, I decided to bite the bullet and spend a little more for a ‘decent’ pair of shoes, not good shoes, those are too expensive, just decent. Bad move. I know better, but I have gotten cheap in my old age.

The 5k that my wife and I participated in last weekend was the first ‘real’ walk in the new shoes. They didn’t hold up all that well. I got away with 3 blisters, 2 large but not bad blisters on my left foot were on the pads of my foot under clauses. They healed back up without any attention in just a few of days. The small one on my right foot was on the little toe and after 2 days I had to peel it away. All and all not too bad, but the reason for them in the first place was my choice of shoe. A size a little too long to accommodate the width of my foot allowed my foot to slide a bit in the shoe and the ‘spring’ heel floats around in all directions a little also contributing to the movement inside the shoe. The heel has broken down some and is now very squishy, because I am a big guy.

Some discussion on footwear with my wife over the last week and the decision to make some marked improvements in our out-and-about time prompted a walk over to the new Sports Authority store, so conveniently located in the same center as our usual Starbucks haunt. Turned out, they were having a big 4th of July sale including, you guessed it, shoes. My intent was to get a pair of hiking/walking boots that we had seen on one of our scouting expeditions in the store earlier. I did get the boots, but I also found a pair of walking shoes in the clearance aisle at close to 50% off. While we spent a little more than I had planned on, I am now in much better shape to embark on the new walking/hiking plan for this summer.

Old BootsI retired my Wolverines along with some cheap slip-ons I bought last summer as soon as we got home.

As a small preview of a day adventure to come, we are planning a day hike from HWY 9/HWY 35 down into Big Basin. Some of the old timers from my scouting days will remember this as the Skyline to the Sea hike. We will only be doing the Skyline in to Big Basin part, but it is still a good day hike. I will be setting up some interesting stuff for the post on that soon.

Until then, may every day be filled with adventure!