There’s convenient bicycle parking just outside the Sortera office. I guess those with more expensive bikes park them in parking garages, but mine isn’t enticing enough to make me worry about anyone taking or damaging it in full daylight in the middle of a street.

The other bikes that mine shares the stand with are all also ordinary, classical city bikes. What I see on the roads is rather different. The classical bikes aren’t so common among commuters any more. Instead, commuters and their bikes are diverging into two extremes. On the one side there are the racers: long men (mostly) clad in Spandex, on skinny bikes with lots of gears. On the other side there are the e-bikers: people dressed in jeans or office wear, casually pedalling on e-bikes. One group focuses on the exercise; the other one on convenience. (And both are willing to pay a fair bit to get it.)

Both groups go quite fast, so the average speed of cycle commuting along the routes I follow has definitely gone up over the years.

For me, the city bike still seems like the best compromise. I like getting exercise while I commute (and really, while the e-bikers move their legs, it’s not like they’re going to break a sweat) and I also like being able to use my bicycle in my everyday life without making a whole deal out of it. I can bike to a store and step off the bike and walk around in normal shoes.

The Urb-it office is on the seventh floor, with grand views over the roofs and squares of central Stockholm.

First thing in the morning, walking up all seven floors is sometimes a struggle. I arrive huffing and puffing, and sometimes a bit dizzy. Sometimes I even take the lift.

After lunch it’s like it’s a whole different set of stairs. Or a whole different me, I guess. I’m fairly racing up the stairs, taking them two at a time without any particular effort.

Early mornings are not my thing. My body needs hours to properly wake up.

Look, an actual workout photo, with no kettlebells in sight!

I know, yet another boring dumbbell photo. (I am bad at remembering to take photos during the workout.) But I am proud of sticking to the workout habit when, some days, I really don’t feel like it.

And that’s only before starting. I still tell myself that I can stop partway through but I never end up taking that out. I do actually enjoy the workouts, and the pleasant muscle soreness afterwards.

I started a habit of exercising for at least 15 minutes a day, keeping it small and achievable to help make it happen. But the low target actually ended up being counter-productive. 15 minutes was so short that even an energetic walk to and from the supermarket was enough, and after a while I was checking the box even though I wasn’t even getting my pulse or breathing up.

New habit: at least 20 minutes of strength training on weekdays when I’m not in the office, or 30 minutes of brisk walking otherwise.

I’ve also been avoiding strength training for a while because the mere idea of stripping off my warm layers in order to change into workout clothes has been unpleasant. But now that I’m doing it again, I was reminded that the workout itself gets me nice and warm, and the effect stays with me for some while after the workout. Net net exercising makes me warmer, as long as I can get over the initial threshold. As with most “hard” things, I just need to get past that initial resistance, and remember how good it will feel afterwards.

The photos of dumbbells are boring, I know, but I did a proper workout, with weights and everything, this week again, and I’m rather proud of that, and I want to revel in that pride for a moment.

Maybe next time I’ll bring out the tripod and try to get some more interesting workout photos.

The workout equipment has been gathering dust for many months. But today! I actually did a proper workout for real, with weights and everything. I decided it several days in advance so I wouldn’t have the “I’ll do it tomorrow” excuse, said that it would only be 15 to 20 minutes so it wouldn’t feel like too big of a commitment, and got it done. It actually felt too short.

If I get no other exercise in, I do my daily half-hour of brisk walking. I almost always follow the same route, with some nice steepish hills here and there, and a decent-sized park at the far end that I take a big loop through.

The part that goes along streets is not very exciting. I’m not interested in other people’s houses and gardens. I usually read while walking and treat it as pure exercise. But the park is strikingly nice to look at, in almost any season and any weather. Swedish parks are – unlike English ones – generally devoid of flowers or anything else requiring more maintenance than the occasional mowing. They’re all just grass and trees and large bushes. But the large open space and the mostly uninterrupted greenery still feels very good.

Full of energy after ten days of activity, I’m making a renewed effort to start exercising daily again.

My daily exercise is a brisk midday walk more often than it is a proper workout session, these days. Often I don’t have the energy for more.

With lower energy levels, my taste in workout videos has also changed. My favourite sources used to be PopSugar (on YouTube) and HASfit. The PopSugar videos with Raneir Pollard were the most fun. But then YouTube turned up their advertising earlier this year to truly annoying levels – interrupting a HIIT workout to show me some ads in the middle really doesn’t make me a happy user! – and I had to give up on those. I don’t mind paying for online services, but I’m not going to be bullied into paying.

I actually support HASfit via Patreon, because I watched their workout videos a lot. But now their tone doesn’t work for me any more. I used to find them motivating, but now it’s almost the opposite. Telling me “you can do more”, “if your brain is telling you you’re tired then it’s lying”, “don’t stop when you’re tired, stop when you’re done” does not help when I was already struggling to find the energy to just start. Reminding me to think about what made me come here, when I barely managed to do that, just makes it harder.

Now I mostly watch FitnessBlender. The workouts are quite similar but the tone is very different. Calmer and less pushy. Forgiving any weakness in advance, somehow. And right now this low-key approach works much better for me.

I often start the workout telling myself that I am allowed to quit before the end. I commit to five minutes only. Sometimes I find the flow as soon as I start. Other times I don’t, and I keep promising myself that I am allowed to quit after this exercise, and after the next one, and so on, if I really don’t feel like continuing. But I’ve never actually used my out.