Today, after a long long while, I went back to the Gotenshita Memorial Arena, Tokyo University’s Gym.

Gotenshita is one of the nicest services Tokyo U. has for its students. It is a large gym with exercise machines, a pool, climbing wall, sports fields and aerobics classes. The equipment is not everything in top shape, but the price for students is 8.000Y a Year – compare that to private gyms, which is at least 8000Y a MONTH.

This is one thing that I like about the Japanese society. I have the impression that people here really value regular exercise – not professional sporting, but actually just getting out of your ass and running/walking/cycling/swimming every now and then. This custom seems to be implanted in their head from school – from what I heard from my Japanese colleagues, they are made to do a lot of physical exercise while they are young, and many of them carry on the custom well into adulthood – it is not unusual to se quite a few people jogging in the middle of the night in Tokyo.

Anyway, I’m out of shape. In past years I used to go wall climbing with a friend in Gotenshita, or doing regular machine exercise, but with the proximity of my thesis, I think I haven’t got close to the gym for a good six months now. So I was aiming for one hour swimming, but could barely make it 30 minutes – I was a bit disappointed because I thought all the walking and cycling I still do regularly to commute everywhere would count for something, but it seems that it didn’t.

My current goal is to try to go swimming at least twice weekly again (I need to go to the gym 26 times to make up for the investment of buying an year pass :-P).

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So, why I’m back to the gym anyway? Thing is, Monday I ended up procrastinating a little too much, and decided to sleep in the lab to try and make up for it. While I still lived in Kashiwa, sleeping in the lab for late night programming binges was less of a pain, because there was a shower in the Kashiwa building that I could use. In Hongo, however, I have no such acessible shower, which greatly discourages sleep-ins (at least until my Thesis deadline get close enough for me to start ignoring things like basic hygiene). The closest thing is the gym showers – however, the gym only opens at 11:00AM (one of its negative aspects).

So I decided to put everything together – I would stay working in the lab until about 4, wake up at 10, head to the gym, do some exercise, shower, and head back for a new adrenalin charged study binge. Did it work out? Well, I got more done today than I did yesterday, sleeping late notwithstanding, so maybe I should look more into replacing caffeine with adrenalin.

I’m still behind the schedule, though, and this is getting me more stressed by the day :-(