in my life

Every once in a while I try to get myself to follow an exercise regime and then I lose interest and/or can't be bothered to get off my ass within three weeks. But! Here I am, trying again, because Exercise Is Good For You. I'm not trying Couch to 5K this time, but rather the program recommended here, which looks like it might be even more relaxed, which means I might be just a little more tempted to follow it.

So! Tonight I did the first workout, 40 minutes including warm ups and stretching before and after. My notes:

-- Being in music RPF fandoms makes working out infinitely more enjoyable :D I can't believe I'm not sick of these songs yet, it's kind of amazing.

-- I am wearing all the running equipment I got for my birthday and look like a Nike commercial (I currently have six Nike logos on my body).

-- This includes my very first sports bra! Yeah, I'm not a very sporty person, and I've never owned one before. They seem so expensive for something I hardly ever use! But it was actually really comfortable, so score 1 for Nike, and now I'm just wondering how often I need to wash it. I didn't sweat too much! And washing it every time feels like it would get, well, really tedious /o\ IDK, I have no idea how often one washes a sports bra! I only have the one, and I want to (in theory) use it a few times a week. For the record I also don't intend to wash my running shirt and pants after each time. Call me gross, whatever, it's not like I have a huge selection in my closet. (LOL, whenever it comes to things like grooming and comfort habits I always find myself making comparisons to being in the army. Which is not exactly the standard I need to be holding myself to. "Yes, but at least you're not wearing the same sweaty t-shirt for two weeks in a row!" No, thanks.)

-- My new equipment also includes Nike shoes that have that special chip that synchronizes with your iPod? So that was cool, knowing at what pace I was going, but less cool is having it tell me how many calories I burned. There was a time in my life when I decided to go on a diet and for a few months I became fixated on counting calories, which made me feel like crap because calories were all I could think about, all the time. Thankfully at some point I managed to let it go, but really, the last thing I want to do is start obsessing over calories again. Knowing how much I burned just makes me think great, now I can't eat because I'll just gain it back and the workout will have been useless, which, no -- I'm not even trying this to lose weight, I just want to get in shape be healthy or whatever. So possibly I won't keep using the little chip, or maybe I'll find a way to disable their calorie calculator.

-- Current weather is perfect for working out, not hot and not cold, just perfectly even, knock on wood.

So, here's hoping I'll stuck with it this time. *wishes myself luck & mostly willpower*

Having just been treated to a surprise!miarr coffee break, I am sitting in the 24-hour coffee place across the street from my apartment, otherwise known as The One With The Wifi, under the merry illusion that coffee place = free time. I have some articles to read for tomorrow's classes, but I'm going to (maybe) have some free time before classes tomorrow, which makes the reading all too tempting to postpone…

Anyway. I would like to talk to you about podfics! Podfics are the Best Thing Ever. Inspired by an ontd_ai spinoff comm, I have decided (again) to try and get in shape. I've been linked to the Couch to 5K Running Plan, which I will attempt to follow in the upcoming weeks. I hate jogging, but I also know that the truly difficult part is getting in shape – once you're already in shape, jogging isn't so bad.

In any case, the part that was always difficult for me with jogging was the boredom, because when I'm suffering (and jogging = suffering, at least at first), music isn't enough to distract me. Music I know bores me because I know it too well; music I don't know isn't interesting enough to grab my attention. PODFICS, however, are genius! They are distracting and fun, and their only drawback for me right now is that my earphones suck and I can't hear very well when cars drive by me. But I've already done two workouts, and tacked on 30-40 minutes of walking to each of them just so I could hear more of the fics I was listening to.

My playlist so far has included:

That Guy by wearemany, read by zabira - American Idol RPF, Kris/Adam, 32 minutes. I love this fic, it's really cute, and it was a good reading -- it wasn't boring despite the fact that I've read it before.

Shell Shock by aphelant, read by her. NCIS/Iron Man crossover, gen and really fun and funny, 13 minutes. I am in love with aphelant as a podfic reader – she was the one who read astolat's Time Of Your Life, which is two and a half hours of epic Cookleta (RPF) That I cannot rec enough, and I've probably listened to the whole thing about four times now. So now I've just downloaded a bunch of stuff she's read and plan on slowly go through them all.

Things I Learned My Freshman Year of College by Ashley, read by celtic_cookie. It's a Jared/Jensen (RPF) college AU fic; kind of epic (nearly 7 hours all in all). I'd never read a J2 fic before, but I was linked to this, and I really, really love the reader. There's a little background noise sometimes, and enunciations aren't always perfectly clear, but she makes up for it her vocal acting, which is so great – it's like I can hear both her and the actors' voices saying the lines at the same time, she has their accents and intonations down, and the fic itself is long and funny and romantic and very college :-) I'm on part 15 or so out of about 30, each one 10 minutes long; I've been listening to this fic at random intervals and public transportation and such for a few weeks now.

And Be One Traveler by amireal and trinityofone (individual chapters can be downloaded here), read by a whole bunch of people. It's SGA/SGA RPF, meaning John/David Hewlett, John/Rodney/David, and John/Rodney. Apparently it's a really famous fic that I'd somehow never heard of? But anyway, it's really long, and the first chapter was 40 minutes long and awesome. Actor-meets-characters-from-their-show is one of my favorite tropes; my very first Buffy fic back in 1998 was actually about the characters switching places with the actors who played them (it remained a WIP forever. Surprising, I know.) Anyway, the fic itself is so far great, and made me smile and laugh out loud a couple of times, and the reading is really cool – it's a collaborative work, so every character is read by a different reader, which was startling at first but I grew to really like it.

The Shoebox Project by ladyjaida and dorkorific (which you already knew) – Harry Potter, MWPP (Remus/Sirius). I've listened to the first chapter so far, which was about 40 minutes, I think. I haven't read the fic since the first time I read it in 2006, I think, so it was almost new to me, and omg so amazing, even chapter 1. Chapter 1 is basically Sirius and Remus correspondence. I don't know if the readers' accents are genuine or not, but the girl who reads Remus has this Scottish kind of accent that is so freaking adorable I want to hug it. And Remus.

That's all I've listened to so far. thingswithwings has recently posted an amazing collection of podfic recs, five separate posts that are all worth checking out; I've downloaded a bunch of stuff that's sitting on my hard drive. My one cardinal rule is that I'm not allowing myself to listen to any of these stories outside of workouts, so if I want to know what happens next in And Be One Traveler, or the next chapter of Shoebox, or the SGA/BtVS crossover that's sitting in my iPod – and I do – I'm going to have to go outside and, you know, exercise.

Do you have any favorite podfics? If you do, link me! It might take me some time to get around to hear them (workouts only!), but at some point I will. The combination of a good fic + a good reader is a blessing that should be shared far and wide :-)

(ETA: omg, water has just started dripping from the sky and onto my laptop. Time to post, pack up and leave. Rain! \o/)