It’s nothing fancy, and I’m not even offering an RSS feed since I can’t imagine anyone else besides me wanting to look at records of my exercise. In fact, the only reason I’ve added this thing to my site is to guilt me into going to the gym regularly.

When I arrived in Saskatoon for my father’s funeral, nine months ago, I took a look at my health, and asked myself, “Am I learning from his example?” He had been very fit and healthy when he was younger, and as he got older, my father’s health kind of collapsed. This made me think: If I’m in so much a weak position, health-wise, when I am merely at the beginning of my 30s, what will I be like in my 60s… if I even make it to my 60s? I told myself I would start exercising as soon as I got back to Korea.

But I didn’t. Then came the first semester of my new teaching job, and some other health emergencies, and then the very wonderful — and in terms of writing, very energizing, but also physically very draining — experience of ClarionWest. When I got back from that, I was in no shape to exercise at all… and then a trip to Australia, and then more health problems.

The killer is that if I had exercised more, I’d have had so much fewer health problems and been more fit. As it is, I’m starting back from close to zero. But at least I am starting.

What spurred me to start exercising again?

This excellent fellow I know named Shawn Scarber was mentioning going to the gym in an email, and I stopped and thought to myself: if Shawn can do it, do I have any reason not to be doing it? Parenting aside, he’s working full time. I have 15 hours of class per week! (Plus some more time spent on preparation, but still…)

So I went to the gym today. And I’ll be going again Wednesday morning. And Friday morning. And maybe Saturday or Sunday morning. And then wash, rinse, repeat. And I’ll be blogging my progress, because the only thing more embarrassing than exercising badly is publicly committing to do it, and then not following through.

The workouts will be tracked in the sidebar, under “workout tracker”, as well as this sub-page… (though I need to iron out some of the kinks in the sub-page).