Fitness for Geeks

Chapter 1. Fitness and the Human Codebase: Reboot Your Operating System

You get up in the morning with the shades yanked down, after having collapsed under the covers at some indeterminate time past midnight (which followed several robotic hours of Facebook typing). Luckily, you’d set the coffee maker on a timer, so a quart of strong joe waits on the kitchen counter. Twelve ounces of that washes down a toasted bagel smeared with extra margarine and jelly, as you’re out the door on the way to a 45-minute car commute.

It’s just the beginning of a marathon bout of sitting.

The Cubicle Blues

Sound familiar? When you get to work it’s an elevator ride off to the cubicle, where you refill the to-go coffee mug with joe that already tastes old, and someone’s left an open box of donuts in convenient proximity. You write code until you’re cross-eyed, interspersed with two meetings where you sit on your behind listening to two marketing/admin guys who love to hear themselves pontificate.

At lunchtime, you take the elevator downstairs and walk half a block to Subway, where you buy a “healthy” tuna n’ cheese sub, which is almost the size of the baseball bat you used in Little League. Half of it is munched down before you get back to your cubicle and that C++ module you were supposed to finish by 5:30, which rolls around with an amazing sense of time squashed into a smaller space than you ever needed it to be.

A few times during the day, you join the crowd congregating in front of the vending machines ...