Blues Improv in F

Video
A little improvisational solo over the 12 bar blues in F

I record some of my practice sessions because it’s really hard to critique my own playing while I’m playing. In this clip, I’m trying to use the F minor pentatonic scale to spontaneously compose a melody. In the second chorus, I am trying to adapt the head to “Eastern Standard Time” by Don Drummond before returning to minor penatonic noodling.

#fitby50: week 2/104

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Last week’s goals:

  • Continue food tracking – stay under calorie target for the week
    • Mostly accomplished this with exception of one day when I was on the road and ate at restaurants all and got desserts.
  • lift 3x this week
    • accomplished – took it easy and still got super sore
  • ride at least 60 mins this week
    • fail. trainer tire arrived but not yet installed
  • weigh in at least once
    • done
  • try to ease into things and not beat the crap out of myself
    • pretty much succeeded
  • try to avoid planning / prep failures that lead to grabbing fast food / junk food out of convenience.
    • mostly worked, except for that one day when I ate two whole days worth of calories.
Net calories (redacted)

So, not a smashing success, but not a total failure either. Goals for this week are pretty much the same as last week.

This week’s goals:

  • Continue food tracking – stay under calorie target for the week
  • lift 3x this week
  • ride at least 60 mins this week
  • weigh in at least once
  • be awesome
  • stay out of the trick-or-treat candy

#fitby50 Week 1/104

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Last week’s goals:

  1. Order a trainer tire for bike  – done
  2. begin logging food in mfp – get a baseline for the junk I’m eating
    • Logged for past 5 days without trying to change my behavior. Turns out, if left to my own devices, I overconsume by an average of about 200 cals /day. Not actually as bad as I feared
  3. Think about meal planning / shopping / read cookbooks
    1. Are we doing paleo / atkins / keto again? wtf are we doing?
      • Probably just going to try to stay under my calorie target. Eating lots of carbs makes that difficult, so I will try to increase consumption of non-starchy vegetables. I’m not entirely convinced of the science behind a lot of the claims made by proponents of these diets. I’m leaning in that direction of lowish carb, but not being doctrinaire about it.
  4. weigh in, get a baseline of where we’re at
    • Done. I have some work to do.

This week’s goals:

  • Continue food tracking – stay under calorie target for the week
    • is the premium mfp subscription worth the money?
  • lift 3x this week
  • ride at least 60 mins this week
  • weigh in at least once
  • try to ease into things and not beat the crap out of myself
  • try to avoid planning / prep failures that lead to grabbing fast food / junk food out of convenience.

#fitby50: Week 0 – Damage Report

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Objectives for week 0: Due Oct 23th!

In the interests of worrying about things that don’t matter, for the purposes of this project, the week begins on Monday, and ends on Sunday. Weekly status blog posts are due by EOD every Monday. This week’s objectives are to asses the situation, make sure my home gym equipment is all operational and still where I left it.

  1. Order a trainer tire for bike ✅
  2. Make sure trainer works / update firmware
  3. begin logging food in mfp – get a baseline for the junk I’m eating
  4. restart Zwift subscription?
  5. Think about meal planning / shopping / read cookbooks
    1. Are we doing paleo / atkins / keto again? wtf are we doing?
  6. weigh in, get a baseline of where we’re at

#fitby50 – Blogging my midlife crisis

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Greetings blog comrades! I started this blog way back in 2004 as a kind of fitness tracker. At the time I was trying to quit smoking and “get in shape.” Things like Strava and myFitnessPal, et al. did not really exist back then.

I am now staring down the barrel of my 48th birthday, and my health and fitness situation is not entirely satisfactory. So, I’m thinking I’ll start a serious effort to make some changes, and use this dusty old WordPress site as a kind of summary of what’s going on in a variety of fitness tracking apps that I use. Amazingly, this is still sort of necessary, because the integration between the various health and fitness apps is still atrocious all these years later.

I am aware that this is not of much interest to anyone other than myself, but, as I have almost no followers on this platform, I won’t be bothering very many people with my drivel. Writing things down helps me to clarify my thoughts.

Objectives: “Getting in shape” turned out not to be a specific enough goal. So, my overall objective is this: Have my body composition measurements within the “healthy range” defined by medical authorities by my 50th birthday. Specifically, body fat percentage must be below 21% by the end of October, 2024. I will be measuring this with a Withings Body composition scale.

Methodology: The basic plan is this: I will consume fewer calories than I expend. This is difficult to track accurately, but I will do the best I can by tracking caloric input in MyFitnessPal. I will track calorie expenditure in a variety of apps, since none of them reliably talk to each other, there will be a great deal of monkeying around. Cycling is logged to some combination of Garmin Connect or Zwift, which will sync to Strava, and thence to MyFitnessPal. Weight Training is logged in FitBod, which is supposed to be able to sync to Strava, but doesn’t on Android, because Fitbod is an iPhone app with Android support tossed in as a half-assed afterthought. If anyone knows a better app for tracking weight training on Android, please let me know.

Governance: I’m planning to do at least weekly posts outlining that week’s objectives and noting the success / failures of the previous week. So, we’re looking at about 104 posts over the next two years.

Wish me luck, comrades!