My lovely wife bought me a copy of Wii Fit Plus for my birthday this year and I think it’s fair to say I haven’t used it nearly enough. It’s great fun to play, but since it involves your whole body really does require you to be in the right mood, a mood different from regular gaming.

But since winter is coming to an end and spring is just around the corner, I’ve found my motivation to get stuck back into the whole exercise and eating right groove.

Yesterday I was all fired up to go for a run, but it was raining and after a stop at the health food shop on the way home, it was getting dark. I thought about what I could do and decided Wii Fit was the way to go, burn some calories, have a bit of a laugh and get back to Prince of Persia, my current gaming fix, tomorrow.

Foolishly, I let the Wii pick the exercises for me and it started me out with a couple of yoga poses. The first one, downward facing dog, wasn’t too bad, the ones I really struggle with are the ones where you stand on one leg due to poor proprioception.The next two yoga poses were a nightmare, the tree, where you stand on one leg with your other foot on your supporting thigh, and a single leg twist which is a knee raise like exercise but the leg you are raising never returns to the ground.

After feeling like a total klutz, I moved on to a couple of exercises I can do and enjoy: rhythm boxing and rhythm kung fu. Both are simple to master, require only a small sense of timing and build up a good sweat.

Super Hula Hoop popped up next, again good fun and good work out, before I finished off with a nice relaxing round of Ski Jump.

All in all, I think that Wii Fit actually gives a pretty good workout and I think I’m going to make an effort to play everyday this week. It’s fun, it’s easy and it’s in my living room, basically it’s the perfect workout.

Since I’m a geek, I have all sorts of gadgets, one of which is my iPhone. Apple’s slogan for the iPhone App Store is, “There’s an app for that!” and there most certainly is. Want to know how far you just ran, how fast you went and even the elevation changes in your run? Runkeeper can tell you.

The name is something of a misnomer, it can do running, walking and cycling. Runkeeper uses the iPhone’s built in GPS to track your activity, then overlays it with Google Maps to show you where you’ve been, how long it took you and other useful data.

This is me riding home from work on Wednesday, and it does include time stopped at lights, but it’s quite a neat application to track your fitness activities.

Unfortunately I won’t be using it for running when I start back up as it largely duplicates the functionality I already have with my Nike+ and my iPod nano. Plus the nano is just so much easier to carry on a run rather than a bulky and heavy iPhone.

Long time no update, I know.

So recently I decided it was time for me to get back out into regular exercise. I haven’t exactly been doing nothing, I’ve been refereeing at least once a week, twice when I was doing mid week girls rugby.

But since the weather has improved slightly in that it’s not raining, it’s still cold, and petrol has gone up in price steadily, I decided to start biking to work again. It’s only 4km and takes around 15 minutes door to door which is roughly how long it takes in the car anyway.

It’s often freezing, as in 0ºC or lower, when I leave for work, but I’m not worried as I have a high visibility wind proof jacket, warm gloves and a full face balaclava. That’s right, when I bike to work, nobody can see my face.

One thing that I’ve noticed a lot since I’ve started biking again, and I know that six trips is not exactly a large pool of data, is that the cyclists’ mantra of “share the road” seems to be something of a one way street. I have yet to see any bad behaviour from drivers but bad behaviour from cyclists is a daily occurrence.

Today I stopped at a red light, a CYCLE red light might I add, it’s got a red bike and everything. There were two other cyclists waiting there, but as soon as a third arrived, slowed down and ran the red light, the other two joined him, leaving me behind to foolishly obey the traffic laws.

But traffic infringements aside, I’m quite enjoying my rides and I’m getting an extra half hour exercise a day and keeping my car off the road. I like to think I’ve already knocked 60% off my fuel bill for the week and will be on the bike again tomorrow, bringing the savings to at least 80%. And that makes it a win/win/win for me, the environment and my bank balance.

Today’s run got off to an interesting start. Part of my pre-run ritual is to put my post run Nuun into the freezer to make sure it’s extra cold when I finish, as I did this I bumped an open box of hash browns and one fell out. Using my ninja like reflexes I caught the falling chunk of starchy carbs before it hit the floor, but the downside of this little incident was my hand smelled like hash browns for my entire run.

The run did not start well, with my right achilles complaining with every stride. It came right after some stretching but proved to be an omen as it seemed that as soon as one niggle came right, the pain just moved to another part of my body.

Once my achilles came right, my lungs started to really burn, then my ankle acted up, followed by an old knee injury reminding me that it was still there, and finally my achilles put up a final protest.

A great quote that I often think of on runs like this comes from Lance Armstrong who said: “Pain is just weakness leaving the body.” While pain is certainly an indicator of something not quite right, there is a difference between an injury and the body complaining about the increase in activity. My little niggles certainly fall into the latter category.

I went just over a minute slower than Monday but I’m really not worried about that at the moment. In fact, every time my iPod lady told me what my time and pace were I thought to myself, I don’t really care, although I did want to make it home in less than an hour.

And don’t fret over my title, was the best song lyrics I could come up with about busting through the pain. It’s from my current powersong Misery Business by Paramore, one of my favourite bands right now.

Today I decided to tackle the big one, the figure 8 run which is a total of 10.5km. I’ve been feeling pretty good with my running but have been aware that I need to up the distance if I want to really achieve some results, so today was the day.

For some reason the front half of this run is really easy, I get to my standard drink stops in North Hagley Park quickly and feeling nice and fresh. Today was no exception but I did notice that my lower calf muscles felt tight and sore whenever I stopped, fortunately the pain went away as soon as I started to run again.

Aside from some initial stiffness in one achilles tendon, the highlight of this run from a suffering point of view would have to be my foot going numb. (Bonus points if you get the reference in the title) I’ve had my right foot go numb on me a couple of times before, most notably between 13 and 18km in the half marathon but never my left foot before.

I’m not too worried about it happening as once I stop it immediately starts to come right, however it’s something I will be keeping an eye on as I don’t want to make this a regular feature of my running. Oddly it doesn’t seem to be related to distance, my foot started to go numb before I hit the 3km mark and was fully numb by 4km.

The run itself was enjoyable, I got around without ever feeling I was really struggling and turned in a respectable time. Not plodding, not setting any records, just getting from A to B (well back to A, it’s a round trip).

My iPod tells me that this run burns around 900 calories so no wonder I lost a whole pile of weight doing this every second day.

Tomorrow I’ll be taking it easy with some yoga and balance games on Wii fit. I have my eyes on Jess’s ski jump record, then Wednesday I’ll be off to referee training at Rugby Park. It’s free and tailored to referees so why not take advantage of it?

So since plan B of my weight loss plan, slicing off body parts, proved to be unsustainable, I’ve switched back to plan A: Eat right and exercise.

Today I headed out for a run around the park, immediately I knew this was going to be a tough one. When I got to the corner where I cross into the park, my iPod told me I was “running” at six minutes per kilometer, sounds more like plodding to me.

But still, I pressed on and the run got easier and my speed increased to my usual 5:30/km, nowhere near my last run’s blazing speeds. Unfortunately I didn’t quite make the full 7.5km, had to take a shortcut to make an emergency toilet stop.

One thing I did note during this run, listening to extremely funny podcasts such as The Bugle is not a good idea, when the run gets hard and your lungs start to burn, fits of laughter are not your friend, despite laughter being the best medicine.

So with a particular brand of genius, I managed to slice off part of my thumb while cooking a nutritious and delicious meal. Perhaps there are less drastic means of losing weight than slicing off body parts, but at least I’m committed.

Unfortunately the pressure bandage I have to wear on my thumb makes exercising difficult, even a slight increase in heart rate caused my thumb the throb. That means it’s been a week since I’ve done any physical activity aside from a little Wii Fit.

After a bit of testing today, I think my thumb is coming right and I’m going to get out for a run tomorrow and see how I go. Will probably make it a shorter run, 5.5km, and after that I’ll be due for a dressing change, so at least the dressing won’t get stinky.

I’m refereeing this coming weekend which is something I’m really looking forward to. I hope to be down to a plaster on the thumb by then, but going to have to take a wait and see approach to that.