A New Fiscal Physical Year

If you hunt back through some of my posts from early last year -- and heck, from years’ past, too -- you’ll see me occasionally talking about physical fitness and making mostly vague promises here to try to remain active, usually according to some imagined schedule.

It was during last summer (or so) that I once again lapsed as far as regular exercise was concerned. That said, maintaining the farm has required a fairly steady pace of physical exertion from your humble scribbler (he said defensively while raising a plastic pitchfork).

I mean, I’ve lifted more 50-lb. bags of feed, similarly-weighted bales of hay, and full muck buckets than I care to count, and that’s not even getting into other daily, weekly, and monthly chores and repairs that are constantly needing to be done.

All of which is to say, I haven’t been feeling especially slothful, although for some reason when July 1 came around this year I was strangely inspired to put on my running shoes and hit the road again. It’s a week later and I’ve managed to string together seven days’ worth of runs in a row -- nothing too outrageous (just a couple of miles), but enough to feel like I’m doing something.

You should have seen my sad waddling around after the third day, when the soreness was at its greatest. Things got much better soon after, though, and Vera has even joined me these last couple of days, which has provided some additional encouragement.

Like I say, I’m not sure what inspired me to get out there again. I would say it was all of the players at the WSOP discussing the importance of being fit in order to play so many marathon days of poker one after another, but to be honest it was more the otherwise meaningless milestone of the half-year starting.

Whatever the cause, I’m going to try to stick with it a little longer this time. Have a trip coming up later in the month (to Peru) which might provide a challenge, but I’ll nonetheless see if I can keep up the pace here at the start of my new “year.”

On the Run

Spent much of the day working then went for a run this afternoon and now the day has already mostly slipped by. After going weeks without running at all, I’ve been five times in the last eight days thanks primarily to Eugene Katchalov.

While in Deauville last week I had a chance to talk with Katchalov a few times, including after his near-miss winning the Main Event as he finished second out of a field of 671. Besides being a talented tourney player, the Ukrainian is also an especially friendly, outgoing guy with lots of interesting ideas -- both about poker and other things -- and a willingness to share them.

On the very first day of the tournament I’d interviewed Katchalov at the first break and we talked about his newfound commitment to fitness and eating well over the last couple of years that had produced many good outcomes for him both physically and mentally. I wrote up a post for the PokerStars blog titled “Before and after Eugene” sharing what he’d said.

During the week I was talking with Vera who was back home following the coverage online. She’d mentioned how the Katchalov post was inspiring, and looking back at it I realized it was.

One point he’d made with regard to sticking to some sort of workout regimen was to have a partner or someone to help keep you going when your inspiration to do so started to waver. For him it was his friend Bertrand “ElkY” Grospellier who served that role, with their hired trainer also helping a great deal of course.

“It’s always nice when you have a partner or friend to go through it with you,” explained Katchalov, referring to having Grospellier likewise working on his fitness with him. “So with ElkY if I’m working out it pushes him to work out and vice-versa. Even if you don’t work out together, just having someone to compare your progress with is important.”

I used to run regularly but over the couple of years had fallen out of the habit. Looking back on the blog, I see myself in early 2009 writing about starting to run every day. (I was also playing poker every day then, too.) I actually kept on running right up until I went out to the World Series of Poker that summer, and even while in Vegas I remember hitting the treadmill several times at the hotel where I was staying.

The frequency of the runs finally lessened, though, and like I say it had been several weeks since I’d run at all when I finally hit the pavement again after returning from France. People sometimes ask me about posting on the blog every day, and often I will bring up running as a kind of analogy -- that like a regular runner, I find myself in the habit of wanting to post each day just to keep exercising these writer “muscles.” But the comparison hadn’t really been applicable to me of late as I had found it much easier to skip running than not to write.

I say Katchalov was the main inspiration, but so, too, was PokerStars blogger Rick Dacey who began 2014 with a goal of running 365 miles during the calendar year. He’d only made it to nine miles by early February -- including an early morning seaside run in Deauville near the end of our week there -- and so I proposed to him that I’d join him in that 365-mile quest and we could push each other, a la Eugene and ElkY.

I’m only up to 7.5 miles now -- still about nine miles back of Rick -- but each time out is getting easier. Missing a month-plus of running means picking up the pace to get back that mile-a-day goal. But with Rick up ahead of me and Eugene and ElkY in mind I’m plenty motivated to keep at it.