I’ll admit to being an impatient person. I joined this gym mainly so I could use the pool over the winter. But you can tell when you sign up, they reeeeeeeeeeeeally want you to do body age evaluation thing, even though it is optional… Now granted, I have no illusions about the fact that I let myself get out of shape since the AidsRide, and I am starting from near nothing. I know this, I have a training plan that works with this. I’m not particularly proud of it, but there it is. They kept saying when I scheduled it that “it’s not pass or fail!” - my ass it isn’t, at least not to ME.
So, I went in this morning and did it. Now, my “body age” is less than my chronological age, which I was positively thrilled with - I figured they’d come back with something along the lines of “Wow, you should be dead!” But, there were some really annoying things about it, because I KNOW I need work, but lets not do anything to make it look any worse than it is, OK? Some time on an elliptical, one strength test, one flex test, and then a Q&A on your eating habits. Not exactly comprehensive, but OK, it’s a start, and I’ve at least got a few specifics I can tend to over the next couple months so I can do it again, and do better. (Nothing like getting a little tweaked for some motivation.)
– The elliptical had to come about from the fact that I don’t do motorized treadmills… (Yes, you may laugh hysterically now.) Seriously, I can count the times I’ve done that on one hand - they freak me out - if it’s not a slow walking pace, I feel like I am going to do a complete face plant and kill myself - I really prefer being the one controlling where the ground is going under my feet. I tried, and I lasted about 10 seconds before I had to tell the poor guy we were gonna have to find an alternative… (They just set the speed up to high walk immediately, maybe if they did it gradually I wouldn’t feel like I was gonna go flying off the back?). So over to the elliptical - never been on one of these. MY GOD, that had to be inspired by medieval torture devices. It wasn’t too bad, but requires a little more coordination that I have on a good day - I found it hard to get into a decent rhythm on it, but I finished without sucking all the oxygen out of the room, and more importantly, without falling off of it. And then the display flashed and said something about “do again, but make it harder” - fortunately the trainer decided this would probably not be in anyone’s best interest… I think he at least cut me some slack for the learning/coordination curve on that one. (He also decide it would be great to have some Q&A while I was on it… I said, “I know you’re trying to make sure I can breathe and stuff, but it’s just cruel to make me try and carry on a conversation right now” cause I was having to concentrate way too much on keeping my arms and legs going in the right direction at the right time.) What I don’t get is how that required more time than the treadmill would have - to me that seems much harder than walking or running, but maybe it’s just my lack of coordination that makes it harder?
– The flex test. Good grief, they pick one of the things I’ve always sucked at. It’s what we used to call a pike stretch back when I was in gymnastics. Couldn’t do it for shit back in the day, even though I could turn myself into a pretzel back then, and still can’t do it for shit now.
– The strength test. Why the hell couldn’t they pick something with my legs???!!? It was basically doing a curl with both arms and holding it, and apparently, I have to work on that. (30 pushups a day have done me no good!)
– The eating Q&A - overall, not bad, came up average on about everything, but one question annoyed the crap out of me - asking about dessert. You had options of “all fat, all calories” down to “low/no fat” - but no option of how often! I was honest - if I’m gonna have dessert, it’s gonna be the real thing. But that’s not real often at all. (I discount the pudding pop binge during the AC outage.) As we went over the answers, that one came up something along the lines of “you suck!” - I told him that one simply wasn’t fair!! He actually agreed on that one that they needed to add some sort of “how often” to that one. :)
But seriously, overall it didn’t turn out too bad, they say I’m not completely starting from ground zero, which I could say was just a motivational kindness on their part, but I know that what I’ve done since I got back from the beach has made a difference. They also seemed to like my goal - it was nice to be able to fill that box on the form with something concrete instead of some ephemeral garbage about “improving overall health” - they think a Sprint Tri is certainly doable next summer, as do I. :-D
Once all that fun was done, I hit the pool for a couple laps. NICE. Especially when I realized after watching for a minute or two that I didn’t have to be in the slowpoke lane. Tomorrow is “equipment orientation” - hopefully they won’t ask me to get near the treadmills again… (Actually, I’m looking forward to that, the last gym I was at SUCKED in this aspect, they had zero orientation, and there wasn’t ever anyone around to help when you wanted to try out a new-to-you piece of equipment, so I shied away from a lot of things that probably would have been good for me, but I didn’t want to inadvertantly hurt myself.)
