I’ll be back at work next week, and with no travel away from Brussels planned until mid-September, I have another chance to establish a routine at the gym I joined back in April.

I have had difficulty in getting into it. My efforts over the last three months have been impeded largely by travel but also by other issues. The most important of these is that the gym workouts have tended to leave me feeling worse rather than better, which is a major disincentive. There are other disincentives too: I live over an hour’s commute from both gym and work, and the gym is then another 20 minutes’ walk from the office, so to get there in time for an hour’s workout before arriving punctually at the office for 0900 means leaving home at 0630. I’m not naturally a morning person, and to get up an hour earlier with the reward of feeling crap all day and sore all the next day doesn’t work for me. (I should say that in the office I am largely my own boss, and can theoretically turn up when I like; but the fact is that there is always work to be done first thing, since the people I work with and for are also starting work at 0900 at the latest.)

One problem is when and how to eat breakfast. My initial idea was that I could do the workout and then pick up some decent fried eggs and bacon in a nearby café to set me up for the day. But it seems that none of the nearby cafés – and there are many of them in the European quarter of Brussels – does that sort of breakfast; nobody stretches further than an orange juice, a coffee from an espresso machine and two croissants. Which isn’t a lot, but even so means another five or ten minutes has to be added to the time schedule for eating it.

So I’m a bit baffled. On the one hand, I’m serious about the goal here, which is to outlive my father (who died at 62) and my grandfathers (who died at 66 and 68). On the other hand, implementing the plan is proving difficult.

• Should I be eating breakfast (and if so, what kind of breakfast) at home before I leave for the gym? I have a hazy understanding that exercising immediately after you have eaten is a Bad Idea. But of course there would be over an hour between finishing breakfast and hitting the gym, so perhaps the immediacy will be less.
• Should I go for a half-hour workout rather than an hour? That crucial extra 30 minutes in bed might be enough to encourage me to do it a bit more. Realistically, I’m not going to manage more than twice a week anyway; would half an hour give enough time for a workout to be useful?

This is mainly a thinking aloud post, but if you do have something burningly useful to say, please do so.