13 posts tagged “gym”
About the title:
See, inside my own head, I made an "Animal House" joke.
I thought about not explaining myself.
That should tell you a lot.
So, I went to a yoga class at the YMCA with my wife.
First one in my life. I just don't do organized classes at gyms.
It was a dare of sorts.
After class she said that it was a hard class and that I did quite well.
It surprised her.
Gee thanks.
Always good to know that I'm not actually as clumsy as people assume by looking at me / knowing me.
We haven't joined a super-cool gym to replace our previous one yet.
Meantime, pulling the wagon with the girls in it up the neighborhood hills has me busy with cardio.
Dropped the almost three year old off at the gym's child center this morning on my way to a morning workout.
She immediately bolted off for the play structure/maze/tube-slides...
On her way, while rounding a blind corner, she met a six year old boy head-on
and knocked him on his keister... flat out.
She just looked over her shoulder and kept on running, with only a slight skip to her stride.
Come peewee football time, we gotta make the girl a running back.
As for me, I managed 450 calories burned in 25 minutes of cardio on an elliptical machine.
Then managed more weight than I thought I could do on the resistance weight machines, for many, many reps.
Huzzah for the strong man!
Then to the sit-up bench, where I met my downfall.
Having gutted through several hundred crunches yesterday, and feeling all fit, I attempted a hundred more.
Felt every single one of the fifty I got through before begging off.
More cardio on the stationary bikes with my tail between my legs and aching rib muscles, then off to the jacuzzi.
Ahh, the jacuzzi.
It's finally a bit above freezing, but it still feels good to come out to the parking lot steaming.
Now, the deal is to be able to do this consistently and not be so achey the next day.
As for the daughter, she can keep knocking boys on their bums for as long as she wants.
Which probably won't be as long as I'll want her to knock them on their bums.
What to get that someone special?
A professional 60 minute massage.
Our gym has a spa center attached and they do magnificent work.
I got my wife a gift card as part of her present this year and she used it yesterday.
Benefits of a pro spa massage over other gift choices:
It won't add to any clutter around the house.
It won't wilt from lack of watering and need to be thrown out.
It won't add to the daily caloric intake of your special one.
It's all about peace, harmony, and relaxation.
Massive brownie-points / good karma for the giver.
Our first four winters in the Midwest were frigid.
And snowy, very, very, snowy; except when it was too cold to snow.
Everybody told us that it usually wasn't that bad.
We believed them the first year on blind trust.
The second year they told us that we began to grow suspicious.
The third year they told us that we began to let on that we knew they were full of shit and they could stop it anytime they wished, thank you.
The fourth winter we told them that it was just cruel, that we were now in on the joke, and seriously, please stop it, we now know what to expect.
We have four seasons alright,
1) Almost Winter
2) Winter
3) Still Winter
4) Road Construction
I huddled inside, as if withstanding a siege.
Except then this year happens.
The high today was 54 degrees. In mid-freaking-December, 54 degrees!
Every other year, I don't remember it being above freezing, for the high, from early November until late March.
If this is what the weather really is like, most of the time, yeah, then this isn't so bad.
Our perceived realities are relative to our own diverse experience.
And now this place could grow on me.
I like the vast library. I love the expansive gym. I adore the two jacuzzi pools within the gym, and the waterslides, and the leisure pool, the lap-pool, and the sanity-saving child-center.
The changing colors of the trees are fantastic.
The diversity of wildlife grazing through our backyard is magnificent.
And now that I'm getting okay with staying here, the wife is getting more and more appealing offers to relocate.
Ain't that just the way of it? I'd like to think the lesson learned is to embrace and appreciate a place earlier on, but this place just really wasn't loveable those first four winters and I don't really know what I'd do differently.
This morning the wife is off to Atlanta for a few and then from there L.A.
But this isn't about her.
This is about me.
What her being gone for a week again means to me is that I've got the kids all to myself.
With no relief.
So there's no opportunity to leave them with her for a bit in the evenings to go shopping or to the gym without them.
It's much, much different hopping out of a car and going in somewhere, doing your thing, grabbing your stuff and jaunting back out to the car, than it is to attempt the same thing with two kids in carseats, with short legs, and getting heavier everyday to carry, and countless straps to attach to everything designed to make transporting them easier.
Never mind that all of the straps have to be attached while your standing outside in absolute frigid weather and winds blowing.
Not really appetizing. And speaking/writing of which.
My standard moping pizza didn't sound appetizing this trip.
Has it happened? Have I really had too much pizza in a short period of time and I've lost my taste for it?
So, to stock up for this week's malaise, I've loaded up on deli sliced lunch meats and two loaves of ultra crunchy granola, good-for-you bread.
That should find me a happy place, so that I can momentarily ignore that everything else has degraded into migraine inducing territory.
I'm crossing my fingers that the gym will have availability for the infant in the childcenter and that her schedule cooperates with their appointments, for at least an hour everyday this week to spell me.
The usual issue is that her sleep/wake/feed schedule seems to match every other infant, so the spots that work for her fill up fast and in advance.
The revolving-stair machine was exquisitely painful in that good kind of not-permanently-injured kind of way.
305 calories in 25 minutes.
And I wanted to quit, and almost did six different times.
The mind-games kept me going to the end.
The wife was on the machine next to me.
If she hadn't been there, I definitely would have stopped when the legs kindled and burned.
I confessed in the jacuzzi of my weak willpower.
She returned the confession.
This, says she, is why we need to workout together, so we don't wimp out.
And we didn't even get called into the child-center to change either one of the kids.
Ahh, relaxation.
Lunch was chicken tenderloin wrapped in a soft flour tortilla with a mix of Frank's hot sauce and peppercorn ranch.
Now, I wait and endure a chick-flick until it is my time to be shorn at the local hair chopping shop.
Kicks ass to be a kept trophy-husband.
The gym we belong to has an outdoor pool, now closed, and an indoor pool that remains open throughout the year.
Each of these pools has a pair of water-slides.
The brace of slides are of the twisting, spiral, half-tube variety about three stories tall with room for, what, about 5 turns in all before depositing you into the deep end of the leisure pool.
I specify leisure pool as opposed to lap pool, because there is one of those, indoor and out, as well.
These slides are only operational during family swim hours, so lifeguards are available to man them, which rarely coincide with the times that I make it to the facility.
However, yesterday they were running, I was there, and there was no line of precocious knee-high screamlings.
I went down the one on the left first, which has a change of turn direction halfway down.
Then I was back up the stairs to take the one on the right, which maintains the turn direction throughout.
I thoroughly enjoyed myself.
I'm hard to miss.
All my ex's will agree. They haven't had any trouble not missing me at all.
But seriously, I am a terestrial observable object.
Not in the same way that a sixty foot billboard with flashing neon and liquid crystal lazers is, but still.
I don't exactly blend in to the landscape.
So it's puzzling to me how some guy in the gym jacuzzi managed to,
and apparently without noticing I was there,
sit on my lap.
I was quite startled myself as my eyes were closed at the time,
which, in case you were wondering,
is how he managed to get close enough to actually sit on me before I noticed.
It was not crowded.
I didn't change positions sneakily while his attention was diverted.
I was not submerged, hiding underwater.
I was the only one in the jacuzzi, sitting stationary on the far corner ledge, when mister-sitter waded in.
Sure, I was seated, but a good half of my torso and arms (and all of my head) clear the waterline.
Sure, things can be bland in the Mid West.
Folks tend to not pay attention to much, because well, there isn't a lot happening to see.
I've seen more than one driver sorting through and reading their mail while driving through intersections.
I've seen two drivers in a parking lot, each backing out of
linear-opposing spots, both honk at the other, and both still proceed
into a collision.
But in the jacuzzi?
Isn't the watering hole supposed to be neutral ground, even in the wild?
What are the odds of a second person, in a 30 person capacity jacuzzi, to blindly walk to the one spot currently occupied by another person, and sit on them?
This incident has me considering a warning buoy to take with me to the gym.
You know if I attached it around a knee with a length of nylon rope,
that might work to keep it stationed to not float off,
but still able to ward off potential lap-sitters.
And why couldn't it have at least been a woman?
Seriously, harshing my post workout mellow.
Ray Bradbury.
For me "Death is a Lonely Business" and "Something Wicked This Way Comes" are powerful narcotics.
They make me want to write, feverishly.
Then, very abruptly, not.
Because, well, what words are left when he's done?
I've been taking the latter in, mainline, straight to the brain through the ear canal these past two days/nights.
I mowed the lawn.
That had nothing to do with Bradbury's words.
But still, a grueling accomplishment of endurance, dedication, and heart (read stubbornnesss).
I was wearing a pair of old Rumple Minze shorts when I mowed.
That has nothing to do with Bradbury's words either, but it figures in later.
About three months ago, with lemur-like agility, I managed to get not one, but two rose thorns inserted into my feet while pruning.
One lodged on the side of my right big toe, the other on the side of my left heel.
Yeah, both feet, see I got the one in the heel while I was yelping back in pain from the one in the toe.
But neither has bothered me since... until a week ago.
Now, belatedly calouses have grown around the thorns and hardened and somehow the pressure of the calouses against the soft meat of my feet is shooting a stabbing pain when I walk very far.
Like, you know, back and forth across the lawn in strips behind the lawnmower.
So, to take my mind off the agony, I figure to hit the gym and then the jacuzzi to soak them.
I drop the kids at the child center.
I take a seat and begin on one of the resistance weight arm machines.
Of note, my wedding ring has been banging into my pinky finger knuckle lately, causing it to ache and throb, so I don't wear it to the gym these days. That might help explain the atmosphere of what follows.
Also, I admit to taking creative license with one detail and one detail only that has been changed to help the story flow. It's up to you to guess which one.
I will play the part of "Me" and a mid-30's woman in tight blue yoga pants (visible thong line) and a snug white jog-bra (with proud THO's the size of small river pebbles) will play the part of "Her"
Me: 1,2,3,4,5, One 1,2,3,4,5 Two 1,2...
Her: Nice Rumple Minze shorts!
Me: 4,5, Huh? Oh, yeah, they're my lucky shorts.
Her: Where'd ya get 'em?
Me: I took 'em off a Rumple Minze girl back in college.
Her: Was she in them at the time?
Me: Well, no, she already had them off.
Her: And just how'd you manage that? Don't they have security handlers when they work?
Me: We lived together at the time.
Her: And you just found them on the floor in the dark one morning?
Me: Naw, she was twirling them around in the air and let them sail.
Her: Because she'd had too many samples of her own product?
Me: Yes and no, she was an ex-Rumple girl at that point.
Her: And you made the lucky reception?
Me: No, my girlfriend did.
Her: Wasn't that awkward?
Me: Not really, it was quite graceful, a clean one-hander. (pantomimes)
Her: Oh, I was talking about your girlfriend being there while the rumple girl was tossing her clothes around.
Me: Ex-rumple girl, and my girlfriend lived there with us.
Her: So, all three of you were together?
Me: Four, there was also a sorority sister.
Her: Wow, how'd you ever concentrate on your major?
Me: That part was easy, I majored in Women's Studies.
Her: And were you able to use that degree?
Me: Absolutely, I got married.
Her: (snicker, snicker, towel-snap, walks off)
Me: 1,2,3,4,5, Four 1,2,3,4,5 Five...
