It’s been about two weeks since I decided to change my career goals, and things have been going fairly well. I’m sticking to a 3+ day/week exercise regimen that involves heavy use of a treadmill. In order to make it into the academy I want to apply for, I need to be able to run a mile and a half in 12:53. Right now, I can do about a mile in 10:00, so I’ve got a ways to go.

In all honesty, the first day sucked. I hadn’t run anything close to a mile since I suffered through my PE classes freshman year of high school. Over half a decade ago. The first mile was the hardest. I told myself over and over that I was doing it to better myself, to get a job that I want and a happily ever after that will leave me quietly contented. In response, my lungs told me to go fuck myself, and my heart threatened to overload and die. So yeah, that first mile wasn’t pretty.

But after that, things got easier. My heart rate stopped spiking quite so high when I ran, and my lungs decided to ease up on the obscenities. Physically, I feel better than I ever have, and I lost close to four pounds in a week, which is… a start…

My new exercise regimen got me thinking, and I came to a kind of startling realization: Exercise is a lot like World of Warcraft.

After the initial shock of waking my body up from a lifetime of sloth, things got pretty easy. I saw results almost immediately, and I got some new abilities I didn’t know I could obtain (jogging without getting completely winded, for instance). But as time goes on, it’s going to steadily become more difficult to see an improvement. I’ll run out of different exercise equipment to try, and I’ll basically be stuck doing the same thing over and over again with the hope that I’ll eventually see some sort of results. It won’t be any new skills or abilities, but I may improve on something I’ve already got.

Basically, I’ll have to start grinding.

Now, the prospect of spending hours upon hours on a treadmill or bike path trying to force myself into shape dosen’t actually sound all that bad to me. The scary part is that I was never much for WoW in the first place. All the monotony and repetition made me feel like I may as well have been doing data entry, and WoW is a monetary vacuum.

At any rate, here’s to hoping I’ll have more incentive when the end goal is to better myself rather than get some imaginary pieces of armor that make a pixellated avatar look bigger.

Cheers!