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Wellness Wednesday for November 9, 2022

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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So, I hurt my back last week. As previously mentioned in this space, I'm having a pretty sweet fall training cycle for a marathon, had worked up to an 80 mile week, knocked out a shorter distance PR, and have generally been in great shape. Of course, as these things go, I somehow managed to strain my back jogging in easy, about 30 feet from my house. I really have no idea how the hell that happened, but it hurt like hell and has relegated me to low impact activities for the past few days.

Let's get to the bright side! I love Zwift and this has given me a reason to loop back to it. If you like cycling at all and need a way to do it without being intensely bored during the winter, I strongly recommend dropping the bucks for a good indoor trainer and hitting Zwift up. It's just gamified enough and varied enough that it strips away the tedium of sitting indoors and spinning for an extended period of time. People that have done in game challenges and ridden them outdoors say it's a pretty good simulation of the required effort. Maybe one day I'll go climb up Alpe d'Huez in real life, but for now, Alpe du Zwift will suffice.

I bought the cheapest "shiatsu" electric massager and it worked great for my lower back.