Gympiphanies

There comes a time in every young man's life, when - against all odds - willpower, tenacity and unfulfilled perseverance come together to help him achieve the impossible. Today was that day for me.

I made it to the gym.

A little background: About 4 years ago, I prepaid $600 for three years, thinking that it was a steal of a deal. Interestingly enough, I ended up paying an average of $30 per trip over those three years. {Curse Boston Public, 24, GG (if you know what this stands for, don't clue in anyone who in that may still think I'm cool), DC (please see previous plea), and Curb Your Enthusiasm for holding me hostage during prime workout time!} Anyway, I've decided to commit myself to making my membership renewal actually work in my favor this time around. Let's see if I can get it down to $15 per trip. Heh heh, that'll teach them to try to hook me.

Like the majority of my trips, my workout was a "breaking-in" workout. BI workouts are usually less intense since my muscles (or skin-bone-fat equivalent) have atrophied and any stimulus will be sufficiently rigorous.

I will spare you the boring details of the actual workout (consisting of light stairs, light benches, light machines, and light sit ups ). What I do want to share with you is the education I gleaned from tonight's trip.

• Always be ready for naked old people in the locker rooms. I strode into the locker room and POW! This grandpa-ish guy is standing in the middle of the room watching the TV...with no clothes on! I hastily tossed my stuff in the nearest locker and started my cardio by running out of that locker room as fast as possible.
• A radio at the gym is the 8th wonder of the world. I finally had the foresight to bring my mp3 player and I tuned into 107.3, which played the audio for TV #1. That I could actually listen to the TVs in front of the treadmills was news to me (until my friend e.dub recently told me about that...he knows all things useful like that!). Up until then, I just tried reading the tiny closed captioning as I bounced up and down during my run. I think my nearsightedness increased a diopter to a 9.25 on account of all that in-motion squinting.
• Don't count your reps. I dunno about you, but counting suddenly makes the goal that much more unreachable. I was doing great on the sit up machine until I had the bright idea to count my reps. Suddenly, each one became impossible to do and I could only eke out a handful more before collapsing. I think there's something about countdowns that builds up unnecessary stress. It's like paying attention to your breathing. Once you do that, you suddenly fear that you'll stop if you don't pay attention. It sucks a lot when I do that. Fortunately for people like me, I have some pseudo-ADD and will soon forget what I was supposed to concentrate so hard on.

After the gym, I felt very proud of myself and treated myself to a trip to Safeway. I picked up canned soups, rice-o-roni type stuff, and two giant bags of chips. Reasoning that I burned off some calories, I promptly ate half a bag of spiral cheetos (synthetic nature's miracle snack). It's a zero sum game, my friends, zero sum.