So a week of my new life as a gym-goer has passed by. What have I learned?
- I can run 5 kilometers in 30 minutes, and not go into cardiac arrest. This is quite a surprise to me.
- The gym is not full of extremely healthy and pretty people, who look down upon the out of shape newbies in disgust. In fact, most everyone I have encountered has been quite nice. This used to be one of my excuses not to go to the gym. I assume it’s quite common for one to feel self conscious about putting your self out there on display as a sweaty, somewhat jiggly mess. But after a couple days, I realized that I’m not the only one.
- The pain that comes the morning after the first couple days of running dissipates quickly when you just keep at it. This same pain that has stopped me in my tracks on previous start up attempts is surprisingly short lived in reality. On the morning of my third day I almost didn’t want to go to work because the thought of walking up the stairs to the second floor was unbearable. But I did go, and I muscled through it. And better yet, I still went to the gym that night. The pain was still there in my legs, but after about 5 minutes of running it was gone entirely. In fact, I ran further and harder than the previous days, because I didn’t relish the thought of the aches coming back when I stopped. Much to my surprise, it didn’t come back with anywhere near the intensity of the morning, and got progressively better through the week. It seems the key was just to suck it up, and work through it.
- I have just added some light weight training to my routine. Nothing crazy mind you, but something with high repetitions to build some foundations to work with. I’ve only done this once so far, and it hurts the next day! However, the running taught me a lesson, and tomorrow I will be back to muscle through it.
- I have also learned that I do in fact have time to go to the gym. This was always a big excuse. But after taking an hour out of each day to go to the gym, I don’t feel like I’ve fallen behind on anything. I’m not getting any less done in the day. It seems that the only thing I have left behind is the idle time I generally spend randomly clicking on things on the hyper global mega net…
Week one, complete, the rest of my life to go.