I’ve been on the boat since last week and have discovered something: if I want to get my steps (current target: 13000) each day I need to get off the boat. But if I’m not going to land, forget it.

We were underway for 54 hours recently and during each of those days I barely managed 3000 steps. I did a little walk around the catamaran deck and discovered it gave me about 50-60 steps. No problem! 10 rounds for (let’s estimate high) 600 steps. 100 round for 6000. 200 for 12000 and I’m sure the other 1000 would come out in the wash.

I can say with complete confidence that doing 200 rounds of the deck is not something I’m about to do. So for three days (because day three was a bit of a washout too after 54 hours at sea, with a harrowing night watch offshore from New York where I spent 1 a.m. to 4 a.m. keeping an eye on fishing boats and enormous cargo ships and tankers–I slept a lot when we dropped out anchor in Newport), I submitted “no activity” as my GCC entry.

I like that they give the option. What happens on a no activity day is they give you your average minus 2000 steps. So, more than you did but less than you usually do. It seems fair enough to me because heaven knows I’d never be that inactive by choice.

When I got my rest and had a full day where I felt human again I hit the pavement to explore Newport, Rhode Island, which is an awesome seaside town on a gorgeous harbor full of the prettiest sail boats I’ve ever seen. Some of them are spectacular. That day I had no trouble exceeding my target, with Renald right alongside me (and we even went to a movie).

The thing is, it’s really not all that difficult to get over 13000 steps in a day but you have to walk somewhere or make a point of going for a walk. It doesn’t just happen.

Being on the boat is not much different from working at home. If I don’t leave the condo I won’t get the steps. It’s that simple. I mean, I can squeeze in an extra 800 or 1000 if I’m short at the end of the day by walking around the place, watering plants, tidying up, that sort of thing. But 13000? Not likely.

Newport is also a great place to run. I went for a leisurely 10K out to Fort Adams, a state park area on a peninsula across form the town on the other side of the bay that forms the harbor, and then back into town, mostly along the water. That secured me over 12000 steps first thing in the morning so put me well on my way to exceeding my daily quota again by the end of the day.

And I do similar things to keep active wherever the boat may be. Yoga, swimming, kayaking and amazing walks on the beach in the Bahamas. Walking /’d running in Annapolis. Hiking when we are up in the North Channel.

But longer passages will need some tweaking. Resistance training and yoga might be good alternatives. And here we might be at one of the limitations of counting steps as a way to fitness. I wore my step counter to a yoga class recently and it hardly recorded anything even though class demanded a lot of me that day. And I get more steps walking to personal training than being at the training even though the workout is way more taxing than the walk. So even though sailing is a big fail when it comes to steps, there are things I can do. Not only that, sailing challenges the body in its own way too. You work on balance, for example. And you’ve got winches to turn and lines to haul. So there’s that.

But it’s also okay to take a time out. A missed few days doesn’t have to translate into a big disaster.

So there it is. Sailing is a non-activity activity if you only count steps. And it’s not the only one.

When you’re away, traveling, for two weeks, the month before a duathlon and a 600 + km bike ride, your thoughts naturally turn (in a bit of panic, especially if you’ve had a cold spring and less riding than you’d planned) to getting at least one ride in. I also love cycling holidays and while this wasn’t strictly speaking for me a holiday, I love seeing new places by bike.

Sarah was the organized one of us, also the one not attending conferences, and so a little more free to round up all the information. So she took on the responsibility for looking for rental road bikes.

Initially Edinburgh wasn’t that inspiring. Hills! Also rain!

The local cyclists had my complete and utter admiration. Not just the commuters but the racing/training cyclists too. One afternoon we watched them in team kit doing hill repeats of the road around Arthur’s Seat. It was about 10 degrees Celsius and alternating heavy mist with actual, umbrella worthy, rain. They looked committed. And a little bit fierce.

We decided that if you waited for a day without rain you might never ride. Scottish cyclists are tough. Did I mention that they were wearing just shorts and short sleeved jerseys?

So on the day after the conference ended we picked up our rental bikes and off we went. There were three challenges. First, riding on the left. I actually find it easier driving on the left as the car is set up that way. On the bike path when another bike comes towards you it’s hard not to veer off to the right. Second, the brakes are reversed and the rear brake is on the left. Tricky. Third, I hadn’t brought shoes and pedals so I was riding with flat pedals and running shoes.

But it was totally worth it. We stopped at a church’s strawberry tea social in Musselburgh. We watched hundreds of mute swans in their nesting/mating grounds in the Musselburgh Lagoons. We looked at all the beaches.  The one in the picture below is Portobello Beach. (Here’s what Portobello looks like on a busy day.) And ate ice cream in the rain.

Sarah’s side of the story: Coming soon!

I’ve been travelling from London to Toronto to help lead training rides for the Friends for Life Bike Rally. Susan and I are
team leads and the training rides are a big part of our job. And it’s tough for both of us. Susan travels in from Milton and me from London. Both of us are swapping excellent riding territory–country roads with wide, forgiving shoulders, in her case also fun hills, for both us, beautiful scenery–for urban road cycling at various ends of the Toronto subway line. With added driving and bus/train travel to get to the start and to come home which neither of us like much.

But it’s for a great cause. Feel sorry for me, just a little bit? You can make me feel better by sponsoring me here.

I knew this one wasn’t getting off to a good start when my train from London to Toronto was delayed and then cancelled because it was damaged after hitting a turkey. Yes, a turkey. A flesh and blood turkey damaged a heavy steel train. I didn’t ask for details.

VIA Rail filled in the rest, “As CEO of VIA Rail Canada, I would like to convey my sincere apologies for the inconvenience caused to you as a result of the service disruption affecting VIA Rail Train 78 on Saturday May 7^th, 2016. On-time performance is a priority at VIA Rail.  Unfortunately, on this occasion, your trip on board Train 78 was delayed due the train hitting an animal which uncoupled the brake pipe hose connections.  The train was further delayed due to rail traffic.”

So I made it to Toronto just after midnight and needed to be at the start of the ride at 9 am. My plan was to take my bike on the subway to the start but I had I known, I might have chosen differently. It turns out there was construction on the line and a shuttle bus took us between where the subway ended and where it started again. I got a lesson in getting my bike on and off the front of the bus. I was starting to feel like a serious city cyclist. I’d never done that in London.

Here’s our ride: 47km: Kipling – Meadowvale

Start: Kipling Subway Station

This is a nice flat, fast route that takes you through the quaint Meadowvale Village, past industrial landscapes on wide, smooth roads and back through Centennial Park

https://ridewithgps.com/routes/6912503

The weather wasn’t great and personally I’d give mixed reviews to the “industrial landscapes.” But the company was wonderful. Hi Susan! Hi Sarah! Hi Cate! Hi Val! I also liked Meadowvale Village and riding the rolling hills of the ring road around the airport. Pretty much car free. I kept thinking it would be a fun spot to race.

I’ve also got to say it’s a new experience riding in the city. While I miss the easy access to country rounds, there’s some things I like better about city riding than riding in Little London (or as friends call it “Canadian London” or sometimes simply “The Faux”):

• In the city the cars aren’t going anywhere very fast and it feels pretty safe riding past gridlocked traffic.
• There are an awful lot more bikes. Bikes, bikes everywhere!
• On some of the city streets there are even seriously segregated bike lanes. Toronto’s no Amsterdam but it’s better than London.
• I’ve been discovering some long stretches of plain old bike path. Like the Don Valley trail and the Lakefront Trail.

Have you ridden in the big city and in smaller places? Which do you prefer?

Sam passed on this article, “The Exercise Myth,” by James Fell (Body for Wife). He says this:

Fewer than 25% of the population exercises enough to obtain even minimal health benefits,¹ and that only 5% of the population exercises with enough regularity and intensity to actually have any kind of impact on weight loss.²

I repeat: only 5% of the population exercises enough to affect weight loss. This figure speaks volumes.

This is the structured exercise most people think of when it comes to losing weight: running, Zumba, Pilates, swimming, weightlifting, cross-country skiing, elliptical machines, martial arts, treadmills, personal trainers and gym memberships … Many will try, spending lots of money, and most will fail.

This doesn’t mean you’re lazy if you don’t succeed at exercise. It just means you’re not interested. It means you’re normal. It means you’re part of the 95%.

Problematic premise #1: “success” at exercise is here defined as weight loss. If you don’t lose weight through exercise, then you are part of the 95% who “fail.”

The other premise I object to is that it’s really, really hard to like moving your body. He starts his article talking about how he crawled across the finish line of a marathon and spent the next 90 minutes in the medical tent. How’s that supposed to encourage any newbie to get started?

Conclusion: exercise sucks.

But wait. Can you get active without running a marathon?  Is endurance training and competing the only legitimate definition of “exercise”?  Of course not. And James Fell is right about this part:

Imagine you’re a visitor from an alien race and, without knowing anything about humans, you use the scanning technology on your interstellar spacecraft to look inside a health club you see people lifting weights, doing Spin classes, sweating on elliptical trainers, and taking the stair-climber to nowhere. You’d fold your tentacles across your thorax, scratch your eye stalk and say, What the hell are those bipedal creatures up to? What is the point of all this?

For most people, they’ll never understand the point of exercise, and listening to someone talk about triathlon training is like trying to understand Klingon. We know it’s good for us, deep down, but that’s not enough to force us to do it on a regular basis. For many, exercise is time-consuming, expensive, awkward, painful, sweaty, boring, stupid … and all for changes just to the body. It doesn’t actually accomplish anything else. When I go for a run, it’s not to get anywhere except back home. When I lift weights, it’s not like I’m building a brick wall or helping a friend move.

For so many people, exercise lacks purpose.

I like James Fell. He’s a realistic guy. And overall his message is that you can get more active even if you don’t like “exercise” in its traditional, painful, intense, time-consuming, difficult form. So why start out with a story about marathon training (my goodness, if exercise=marathon and you read about my Mississauga Marathon experience, you’d park yourself on the nearest couch for the rest of your life). You can do NEAT:

It’s Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis, which is burning calories via methods other than traditional sport or exercise. It’s movement with a purpose, like walking instead of driving, using your bike as a mode of transportation, taking the stairs instead of the elevator, getting up and walking to a co-worker’s office to chat instead of picking up the phone, pacing while on the phone instead of sitting, doing housework, shoveling snow, yard work, carpentry, playing with your kids, walking the dog, doing laundry, moving furniture … All those things people stopped doing because of technology.

When you adopt a mindset of looking for every possible excuse to add in extra movement, traditional exercise be damned, you can burn more calories each day without the pain and hassle, and without nearly the risk of developing a reward mentality in regards to “earning” a tasty treat. What’s more, movement begets more movement. Starting slowly, you’ll find over time that you transform from a sitter to a mover, and you’ll rack up some caloric burns while achieving greater fitness.

That’s the integrationist approach we’ve talked about on the blog before. It’s a reasonable message.

But in order to promote it, is it really necessary to go on and on about how awful exercise is? Yesterday Sam blogged about how she dislikes kale and quinoa, so dammit, she’s not going to eat it anymore.

And we promote the same idea about activity. If you hate a thing, why do it? But do you really, truly hate everything? Is there nothing you feel passionate about? Maybe, but the challenge of activity is part of its allure.

Activity has all sorts of bonuses that don’t include weight loss. In fact, when I dropped the obsession with losing weight, that’s when I really got in touch with the amazingness of my physical body and what it can do.

So though I’ve got no objections to every day movement–in fact if I like anything about the GCC challenge it’s that it’s making me walk a lot more than I used to and I’d forgotten how much I get out of walking as a mental break from everything–I want to make a pitch for defining our success at activities in terms that have nothing to do with weight loss.

Do you feel more energetic? Have you found new ways to spend time with friends? New friends? Are you sleeping better? Getting some satisfaction out of getting faster, stronger, more flexible? How about that headstand you couldn’t do last year but can rock now? Has your cholesterol dropped and does your doctor say “wow” when she takes your blood pressure?

So yes, exercise, like diet, is not a magic solution to losing weight. But it’s awesome! And there are lots of ways to engage in it. And you don’t have to make yourself love a thing you don’t love. But there are great reasons to keep looking until you find the right match.

If you’re already a convert, what would you say to someone in your life who expressed hesitance and doubt about getting active?  Bring on the unsolicited advice!