I'm ready to admit this now. I wanted to get a little way into it before I committed myself, but it's starting to feel like it's really going to happen, so I'm just going to say it.

I've been exercising.

I have been going to the gym every weekday for the past two weeks, and walking "recreationally" on the weekends. Now that I am into my third week without missing once, it feels like the next step is to commit to somebody else that I'm going to keep going, so I'm doing that. Because, frankly, the only time I've found for squeezing the gym in is before work, and while it's relatively easy to get up before 6:00 when it's light and warm outside, it's going to be a lot harder to drag myself out when winter comes. I'm hoping the habit will be so ingrained by then that I'll just keep it up.

What have I noticed, half a month in?

I started at Total Wimp Level: twenty minutes a day on the exercise bike at settings 1 and 2. My joints would get so sore on the treadmill that I just couldn't make that work.

After a few days, I got on the treadmill for 10 minutes at 2.5 mph first, then did 15 on the exercise bike.

I've been increasing ever so gradually, until this week I'm up to 20 minutes on the treadmill at 3 mph average and 20 on the bike, up to level 6 for part of it.

I haven't lost an ounce of weight, which was an outcome I'd been hoping for, but this week that seems to matter less to me, because I really, truly do feel stronger.

I started the year out making one change in my life: getting up early to think and read scriptures. That one little change has led to others, and now this is the change I never thought I'd be able to bring myself to make. The key has been to move slowly. It's taken me a good 35 of my 55 years to get myself into this physical pit in which I've dwelt for so long. I can't expect to climb out of it in a month or two.

But, week by week, I'm getting better.