After Thanksgiving’s gluttony, I decided that I’ve been in better shape in my life. While I’m prone to hike 10-15 miles in a weekend, I don’t do much else unless you consider running between meetings exercise. I switched to diet soda and generally tried to cut back on eating when I was full or simply bored, but neither of those seemed to do anything. So I decided to start running again.

I’ve run off and on since high school, but I eventually stopped because I got lazy, bored, or the weather got bad. A couple years ago we bought a treadmill that sits about 20 feet from my bedroom, so weather is never an excuse anymore. I thought about my other excuses though and how I could prevent from falling into them again.

The first problem was consistency. In the past I would say I would run 2 or 3 times a week. It became way too easy to skip a day and convince myself to make it up later in the week. Solution to that problem: run every day, Monday through Friday. No decision to make each morning.

The second problem was that I would often set goals that were too aggressive. I would try to run too fast and too far and I would start to dread running. In response, I set an easy workout schedule. I used one of the treadmill’s set programs that went just over 2 miles in 30 minutes. That’s practically walking, but it’s better than nothing and it’s still 10 miles a week. As that starts to feel TOO easy (it has once already), I increase the difficulty. The goal is not to make it hard, but to make sure I do it regularly.

The third problem was just getting bored. I can actually watch the TiVo from the living room in the room with the treadmill in it, so that’s not bad. I’ve been using the time to catch up on Family Guy and South Park. It’s really hard to get bored watching those.

So far it seems to have worked. I’ve been running for 2 weeks. I’ve only missed one day it was because I simply woke up too late. I’m taking the time I used to spend contemplating my existence in bed or checking email/web surfing on the couch and exercising instead.

Now how do I watch TiVo from the treadmill? It’s kinda wacky. There’s a coaxial cable that runs from the back of the TiVo, underneath the house and back up to a terminal next to the treadmill. From there, it connects to the back of an old PowerMac 7600/120 with an ixTV video input card. The driver software is hopelessly old, so the Mac runs OS 8.6. Other than serving as the only Mac we have left that can read floppies, this is all this computer does. The internal speaker on the Mac isn’t nearly loud enough to hear over the treadmill noise, so I hooked up the audio output to a wireless speaker transmitter. I originally bought the speakers as surround speakers for the living room, but they’re 900mhz and have way too much static. The wireless speakers sit on a bookshelf behind the treadmill.

Controlling the TiVo involves more wireless magic. I use a Leapfrog Remote Control Extender to transmit signals from the TiVo remote back to the living room. Amazingly, it all works.

My more recent problem was watching DVDs. The old Mac obviously doesn’t have a DVD drive, and is probably too slow to play them anyway. My more modern G4 Mac is in the same room, but it has a CD burner with no DVD drive. So to watch DVDs, I have to rip them on my laptop, then copy them over to the G4. Inconvenient, but perhaps I’ll replace the CD burner with a SuperDrive someday. In the meantime, I’m well-entertained when I’m out of breath.