Not fattening up, but trying to pamper myself more

During this very busy summer I haven't been very good about doing some of the little things that keep an athlete healthy and feeling good.  My diet hasn't been bad, and I'm getting almost eight hours of sleep a night, but I haven't been getting in those recovery sessions I talked about during the spring race season.

But I was motivated to do one tonight.  I've spent the last few days stripping almost a century's worth of gunk off the wooden staircase in my building, and that has involved much bending over while operating a couple of different electric sanders along with some hand-planing and hand-sanding.  This evening I was really feeling it in my lower back and hamstrings, so I took a nice warm bath and followed that with some stretching.  I still feel stiff but not nearly as bad as I did before.

On another topic, I weighed myself on my mother's bathroom scale today and registered 148.5 pounds. I'm generally not very diligent about weighing myself, largely because I don't own a decent scale of my own.

I've always been a pretty slender guy who doesn't put on weight easily.  During the peak of my career as a collegiate distance runner I weighed in at a waifish 115 pounds.  Once a series of injuries had waylaid my running endeavors, I began to gain some weight, but not because I was getting fat.  Rather, I was spending more time in the weight room and putting on some muscle mass.  Eventually I started taking my paddling more seriously and I think that further development of my upper-body muscles made me carry more weight naturally.  By the end of my twenties I weighed in the mid-130s, and a decade later I was tipping the scale in the high 140s.

These days, about 150 pounds seems to be what my body wants to weigh.  Once thing I've found when I very occasionally step on the scale is that a drop in weight seems to correlate with feelings of low energy and lethargy.  This was the case a week or ten days ago when I was in the physical doldrums: my mom's scale told me I was down to 146.5 pounds.  Now, at a couple of pounds more, I'm feeling pretty good in spite of my sore back.