Workout Week 33: Plans Seldom Survive Engagement with the Enemy

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Otherwise known as, yet another new plan.

I left a somewhat long-winded post on the subject on FaceBook:

But to rephrase for those who don’t want to wade through my awkward attempt at summarizing on there, I finally decided that even though I’d prefer not to do any “working out” in the morning before I go to work (before I spend practically all day on my feet to the tune of 15-20K steps), my options for the “not licensed for YouTube” songs on Beat Saber are to upload them to YouTube anyway (and expect copyright claims), to play them when I’m not recording, or to find out I’ve wasted my money because I never play them.

While one of the nice things about using a Quest is that I can play it even in nasty weather (with the modem and computer all fully disconnected from power lines) I decided that a single song in Beat Saber first thing in the morning even on workdays was in order. Whether I do an unrecorded session on my free days, in addition to trying to get upload-worthy footage of everything else, remains to be seen.

But in any case, I decided that I would do the same progressive difficulty level for these sessions as I mean to do for the YouTube footage–start at the absolute easiest difficulty level for any given song, continue playing that level until I get the highest score tier, and only then move on to the next difficulty (at least until I determine that the speed and switching from sweeping arm motion to quick wrist movements starts giving me diminishing returns for workout purposes, which is very much a “listen to your body” situation).

Ironically, having previously been only getting A’s and B’s and I think a single S, and with very little practice at that, as soon as I made this decision I immediately got SS in both of my bought-and-paid-for songs, forcing me to change to normal difficulty the very next time I played both of them (upon which I got S in Greatest Show and A in High Hopes).

I also have a fan/”mini air conditioner” sitting on my dresser right at head level, so if I face that way when I’m working out that helps keep the sweat level down. (Doesn’t really seem cool enough to function as an air conditioner–it has a reservoir that can hold ice water and I’m wondering if I actually need to add ice to it since just adding cold water doesn’t seem to feel any different than keeping it dry–but so far it’s been good enough until I can justify the cost of a better one.)

And on the subject of recordable footage, I got in one session of Ring Fit Adventure.

Here I skipped past the “Robo Wrecker” mini-game (after investigating it a time or two before just deciding to move on through the main levels)… not because I had chosen not to do it but because I couldn’t remember if I’d done it.

I’d totally overlooked the checkmarks on the ones I’d completed in favor of looking for shading or icons that indicated that I hadn’t… indicators that were absent from that particular level, though I do not yet know if they were absent because that’s normal for Adventure Mode mini-games or the fact that I’ve done this particular mini outside of Adventure Mode was enough to tell Ring Fit that I’d “completed” that particular level in the past.

Moving on to Zombies Run

I have to say, this is probably the first time I’ve related to one of the characters in this series on such a personal level.

In one of the clips in “A Regular Meds Run,” Doctor Myers describes some of her memories of the world before the infection and how we tend to expect things long after we cease to have a reason to… and to explain this, she provides the example of her dog Buddy, and how even ten years after he died she would still come home expecting to see him.

Same, Doctor Myers, same. It’s been seven years for me but I still frequently expect to see Jessie greeting me when I come home, chasing me into the bathroom (as my parents egg her on), staying up with me as I burn the midnight oil on the computer because she doesn’t want to go to bed alone, things like that. I wonder if Doctor Myers has also caught random glimpses of Buddy….

Now that I’ve done the Patient 29 episode, everything I’m reading tells me I need to move on to the “race” missions, so I’ll have to figure out what order those play in. At least if I want to play everything in story order.

The 5K course in New Canton occurs concurrently with–or towards the end of–Patient 29 so I’ll be doing that next, and I’ve confirmed that Abel’s own 5K course takes place following the episode “Eavesdropping” (which I’m still several episodes away from), but finding where the rest fit within the context of the season is proving to be a little trickier.

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