Back on the wagon

Well, after two months of inactivity and a load of different excuses, I finally returned to doing some exercise this weekend. As always, things tend to look good for the first week or so, obviously.
While it was demoralizing how far my level of fitness had fallen since the fall (when I was able to run half a marathon), I have at least started doing something. It will obviously be a while before I’m back to my level of fitness from the fall (let’s not talk about my old levels of fitness because that just gets depressing), but at least I can feel like things are going in the right direction.
Importantly, doing some exercise seems to help with my headaches. I wasn’t expecting it to be positive in this respect, but that’s a pretty powerful motivation factor at the moment, since I’m really really really tired of having a headache all the time. I’m hoping that the workouts, in combination with physical therapy and stretching, will resolve the issue in a longer-term way. And if I have to be doing some amount of cardio every morning in order to not have a headache, that’s a habit that wouldn’t exactly be bad for me in any case.

For now I’m just working up slowly on the elliptical, but I’m hoping to at least improve my ‘technique’ on it so I can optimize my workouts in terms of maintaining a high heart rate, or even doing interval training. I have, however, discovered that each of the machines in my gym are different despite being nominally identical. A given ‘level’ setting is not the same resistance on any two machines. Which is just weird. Oh well, I’m certainly not expecting the ‘calorie count’ to be anywhere near accurate, but it’s still kind of weird that things are so different from one machine to the next.