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Exercise Timer

Thanks to the pandemic, I no longer have to commute to work. I am fortunate enough that I can work remotely, so my commute is effectively thirty seconds these days. I live far enough from the office that it used to take me a noticeable amount of time to get there, so I'm saving a bunch of time as a result.

That's a great thing, but it brings up an interesting question: what should I do with that extra time? In my case, I decided to use my commute time to exercise instead. At this point, I've been waking up early for years, so I've gotten used to it. I'm not even sure I really need my alarm most mornings, my body would probably get up at that time on its own. So, I chose to get up at the same time as before, but instead of sitting in a car or a bus, to hop on an exercise bike for a period of time.

Once I'd made that decision to use that time for exercise, though, the next question became how long I should exercise. The most obvious answer was to replace an equal amount of commute time with exercise time, but I'm not honestly sure I could tell you exactly how long my commute took. I mean, I could probably figure it out by doing some basic subtraction, but there wasn't any guarantee that that'd make sense. For example, say my commute took seventeen minutes, door to door. I've never heard of anyone suggesting that you should do seventeen minutes of cardio (for the record, the American Health Association seems to recommend 150 minutes/week).

As it turns out, this probably sort of naturally worked itself out because a) I use my phone while on the exercise bike and b) I play some phone games. I remember tracking the minutes of exercise pretty closely at first, but then at some point I noticed that if I completed a couple of quests on my phone games, it lined up pretty closely with my expected finish time. So, I more or less just started using that as my timer. Once I'd finished a small handful of tasks, I knew I was done.

That's an amusing turn of events in it of itself, but it really hit home when the Mild Wife and I were having a video call with some friends. I made an off-hand remark about exercising in the mornings, and our friends asked how long I exercised. In hindsight, it was a pretty reasonable question, but I wasn't really prepared to answer it without a long tangent. The best I could do at the time was to say I play some phone games, so I knew I was done once "I'd matched enough colors." I think I got the general point across, but it drew a chuckle from absolutely everyone. I can't blame them, it's an interesting way to decide when you've done enough exercise.

In any event, I've learned that I need a better explanation for how long I exercise in the mornings. Otherwise, I'm liable to draw more raucous laughter.

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