fitness goals Archives - Memos and Mirth

Back to the gym

August 17, 2020

Dennis Jansen at the gym wearing a Beauty Bar shirt in Washington D.C.

Just prior to shutdown, I was halfway through a modified version of the “75 Hard” exercise fad.

The gist my routine was that I worked out twice a day for a minimum of 45 minutes per session. It was a big commitment, but felt great (most of the time).

I never subscribed to some of the more arbitrary rules of the 75 Hard program — like the requirement that one session has to be outside, or that you can’t make-up missed sessions when work gets crazy. Even I understood that flexibility is needed for thunderstorms and client demands. I also wasn’t going to take 5 minute cold showers every day because that’s clearly nonsense.

The point of this fitness spurt was to train myself to understand that exercise is something to be prioritized. Scheduling two exercise sessions per day instead of just one also makes it very hard to skip working out altogether. In short — I was on a roll.

2L Fall Summaries

Best Week Ever 11: Reboot

November 16, 2009

It feels like fall, it feels like finals.

The leaves lasted for (what feels like) two weeks. Some trees dropped their leaves immediately, whereas others went out in style:

That’s over now. Almost all of the trees are bare. The neighborhood feels both naked and urban because the buildings are no longer hidden by the trees.

The darkness is as glaring as the bare trees. It is pitch black by 5:30pm, so the evening commute feels like 30 days of night with potholes.

But I was warned. When I first came to law school the 2Ls warned me:

Scary 2L: “Finals are bleak. It will be dark when you go to school and dark when you come home.”

Insert a Dr. Evil cackle, and you have your typical doomsday-prophesizing 2L…coming to a cover of an Enquirer near you!

The darkness is why I spend as little time in the law school as possible. The classrooms are in the basement, so students who don’t make an effort to leave for lunch end up as pale as vampires.¹

Besides avoiding vampires, my aim this coming week is to take better care of myself. The past few weeks were disastrous for my health – it’s as if I said, “Hey! Finals are coming up! How about I get as little sleep as possible, eat shitty food, stop working out, and then pump up the caffeine – surely they make caffeine IVs – and then I can have a nice Michael Moore chin to keep me warm and cushy for finals.”

Sexy.

The turkey is the only thing that needs to be festively plump this month.² The marathon training begins in earnest tomorrow. Now excuse me while I get some of that much-needed sleep.

¹ These are the same students who can be found hissing at whisperers in the library… I think they are trying to keep with the theme.
² And the only thing that needs a turkey neck, mmkay?