I’m never ever a muscular, sporty type of person as you know. My secret of not following into obesity past 30 years is simply by not having too much, which worked quite well. Then I passed 30 years old. Then I got married. That indicates I’m fairly likely to have a big tummy within next 12 months. To be honest I don’t feel bad having one, given its already there for couple of years (last time I was associated with the word “slim” was 5 years ago). I worry that I don’t have the capability to take it out. According to Philosophy 125: scientific reasoning, the only way to prove something is to show that I can’t disprove it. That means if I show that I can’t take my tummy away, I can be certain that husbands over 30 are unable to escape the fate of big tummy.

And doing regular exercise to a programmer is difficult. So difficult. It’s not about the time, the workout, but about the repetition. The sports I do, swimming, involves loads of repetition. Over 30 minutes I basically swim, turn over, swim, turn over, swim. The pool below where I used to live, was so small that I had to make as much as 52 turns in 30 minutes. As an efficient programmer i can’t tolerate repetitive movement without some efficiency improvement.

So I moved to public pool. It is standard 50m long, with loads of people. Now I do 50% less turn, plus there’s a huge meter, so I can keep checking on how fast I swim (about 2min 20sec for 100m), depending on the traffic.

And did I say there are loads of people? Besides lots of seniors, there are kids, boys, and girls if lucky. With the equal numbers of kids of both gender learning to swim, I always wonder why there are significantly less girls swimming. The ratio is like 98 men vs 2 women. And there are fast swimmers. Some are suddenly really fast, finishing 100m then rest for few minutes. I don’t understand how that works in exercise. These people have no relations with my exercise. It i need to frequently browse around, look for targets (I mean fast swimmer), then try to swim faster than them. That makes my swimming less boring.

Saying so my tummy is still here. It’s smaller now but I still need to continue to disprove the rules: did I say I havent changed my diet (yet)? That’s the best part of the reward of exercise to me.