The Wall Street Journal recently had an article about various forms of exercise “boot camps”. They rated one of them, which use “kettlebells”, cast-iron weights used by the training regimen used by the Soviet military, as being “surprisingly intense” because the revewier’s t-shirt was drenched after 40 minutes of exercise. Heh. You call that intense? I can get my t-shirt drenched after 30 minutes of Dance Dance Revolution, and if I go on for a full hour, I’m literally dripping onto the dance pad….

I went bicycling for three hours today, going through Winchester, Arlington, Lexington, and Bedford for a total of 32 miles. Given that this is the longest I’ve ridden in probably at least 7-8 years, I’m surprised how well my bicycling muscles seem to have survived intact. My bicycle seems to have been in pretty good shape. I had Ace Wheelworks give it a checkup, and it came back with a clean bill of health.

Hmm… I’m definitely in worse shape after not doing regular exercise while I was on the road. I’m finding myself losing my breath and getting winded after doing DDR songs which wouldn’t have bothered me at all a month ago. Some of it might be because I’m wearing sneakers now (instead of doing it barefeat) in the hopes that cushioning will help spare my knees from aching and in the long term, getting destroyed.

For the past week or two, I’ve been using Dance Dance Revolution instead of my NordicTrack to get my daily dose of aerobic exercise, and it’s definitely been working out quite well. It’s a lot more fun, and much more interesting, since DDR is at least as much a mental game as it is a physical one. I just recently managed to reliably pass a five-foot song by realizing the trick was to expand by lookahead by one.