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The Gym – Part 3

smoosh — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 16:01:17 +0000

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 itâ€™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 Iâ€™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 didnâ€™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 didnâ€™t relish the thought of the aches coming back when I stopped. Much to my surprise, it didnâ€™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. Iâ€™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 donâ€™t feel like Iâ€™ve fallen behind on anything. Iâ€™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 netâ€¦

Week one, complete, the rest of my life to go.

The Gym – Part 2

smoosh — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 13:50:25 +0000

One of my fondest memories as a kid was from when I was about 13 years old. I remember being by myself behind the grade school that was just a 2 minute walk down the road from our house. I was standing at one set of goal posts on the soccer field with the other set firmly in my view. A couple of deep breaths, then “BANG!” The starting gun in my mind went off and I exploded into a full run. About a quarter of the way down the field I hit my stride. My feet barely seemed to be touching ground, they were just every so often brushing it to keep me afloat and moving forward. It was one of those moments where everything else seems to have faded away and it was just me and the wind, coming as close to flying as a land bound kid can come.

I used to love running. Sprinting in track and field, cross country, or just sprinting around the house in a rain storm. Something about the body shaking rhythm, hypnotic in its regularity, quiets my generally overactive mind. It lets me focus on just one important thing; taking the next step.

Somewhere in time I lost touch with this. It was about the same time I realized my new found the love of sitting in front of the computer, and it was continued by the lure of intoxication and the killing of braincells with my friends a few years later.

Soon smoking entered the mix, and before I realized what I had done to myself I was incapable of recapturing that feeling I remembered so fondly. Any attempts at fitness ended with frustration and disappointment with myself because I couldn’t do much of anything without bringing on a smokers coughing fit. The memory was just a memory that I felt like I would never be able to recapture.

Flash forward to the present day…

I am no longer a smoker, but I have not come much closer to reliving the dream. This time, my excuse is simply laziness. It took a while to even come to admitting that truth. Years of a sedentary lifestyle have left me with extra pounds and a cache of excuses that have been weighing me down, keeping me motionless. The most running I have done in the past few years has been with the WASD keys on the keyboard as I navigate virtual worlds. Hardly a substitute.

However, as previously mentioned in Part 1, I have found my motivation. I’ve tossed out my excuses (Some of which I will discuss in Part 3), and I have started to run toward one of my fondest memories.

3 workouts down, the rest of my life to go.
I’m sore, but at least it’s not from bearing the burden of my excuses.

The Gym – Part 1

smoosh — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 15:54:13 +0000

I’m 33 years old.
I have been inside a gym exactly 3 times, all in the last week. Once with the intent to sign up, twice with the intent to work out.
I think what finally made me decide to try and make a concerted effort to work out is my yearly physical. I have had two, in the last 33 years. During the span of 1 year between the first and the second physical, I gained a total of about 4.5kg. (10 pounds for the non-metric minority) That shocked me pretty significantly. I wasn’t creeping, I was running toward the obesity line at an alarming rate. Tack onto that the fact that my blood pressure was mildly elevated, and it was enough to make really think about where I would be if I continued on this course for even another 5 years.
An obese nerd with high blood pressure, well on track to heart disease, and well on track to leaving Lily without a dad, and Laura a widow.
That’s the part that truly rocked my world view. I might be able to let myself turn into a sweaty, hard breathing mess who can’t walk up a flight of stairs without taking a break, if I was the only one in the equation. But I couldn’t possibly do that to them. No way. I have too much to see and do with these ladies, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to leave them without a fight.
So…
The epic begins. The guy who has not worked out…well, almost ever, is hitting the treadmill, the stair master, and who knows, maybe even the weights…
Trip two is down, only the rest of my life to go….and if this all works out as planned, that will be a very long time. For me and my ladies…
More to come…