still_life

This should be a cinch for me to accomplish, with the caveat that I must ask if my medical condition prevents me from donating. I should do this Monday February 11th at the Colchester blood drive.

Every day, I need to be doing some exercise. First of course, are the indoor exercises, which can be done regardless of the temperature outside. Each day after I wake up and before I go to sleep, I want to:
do at least 25 good, full push-ups
do at least 50 good, full ab crunches
do at least 100 skips of jump rope (this I need to do in the basement, on a concrete floor)
do leg and back stretches (hamstring stretch, leg stretch, leg to chest stretch, upper back stretch)

I will increase the numbers on these as my muscles are able to work harder and my body becomes more flexible. Then every day I will try to do outdoor exercises, depending on the temperature: if it is between 50 degrees (factoring in wind chill) and 90 degrees (factoring in humidity), then I must exercise outdoors. That outdoor exercise routine will consist in at least one of the following:
50 minutes of jogging (with as little interval walking time as possible)
1 hour 15 minutes of cycling (not leisurely cycling either, the “pushing yourself to push the pedals” kind of cycling)
1 hour of sustained swimming, whether breaststroke, backstroke, butterfly, or front crawl.

The benefits of a daily exercise routine are fairly obvious; every day now, new studies are coming out, revealing how good exercise is for the body and the mind. Increasing the longevity of life, increasing endurance, increasing the body’s ability to work under physical stresses, increase general feelings of goodness or, to be Platonic, eudaimonia, look better, feel better about oneself, and even improving memory retention. It becomes apparent that rather than asking myself why I should exercise, I should really be asking myself why I shouldn’t.

P.S. Also, I want to look like a male version of Katharine Schweitzer.

The trick will be to establish a daily quota of pages to be read, and of course, to make each daily quota add up in such a way that by the end of the week, it comes out to the number of pages in the book.
For example: I’m currently reading The Sophists by William Keith Chambers Guthrie. I’m at page 108, out of a total of 319 actual “reading” pages (not including bibliography and indices). So I figure if I want to get this book finished by Saturday night, I’d have to read 70 pages today, tomorrow, and Saturday, while managing to write all the commentary I’d like to in my reading journal, and compiling a mental or even written summary of my thoughts on the book by Saturday night.
Of course, my plans are to actually get this program going by Sunday, the first day of next week, so I actually have the whole other week to finish this book (or perhaps I’ll change my mind and decide to complete this first book by Saturday, seeing as I’ve already read 100 pages into it).
Also, once I get really good at this book-a-week thing, I will probably be tempted to up the speed to a book every 3.5 days, or maybe, eventually, a book a day. But I have to remind myself that speed is not the ultimate goal, that what I really want to be doing is absorbing and working to understand the book on a deep, content-rich level. Otherwise I will never receive the actual benefits of this programs: enhancing the ability of my mind, not merely to process and remember the things I’ve absorbed, but to grasp fundamentals both in philosophy and within the human experience.