Workout Fail

For one month I have been out of the gym. For one blessed, restful, lazy month they had torn apart the men's locker room and disabled the showers. No showers means no workout for me. I took the month off.

Oh sure, I could have gone to the workout class after work, the one at 6:30. Truth be told, I did go to that one once. That was the one where I hurt my back. Then my car wouldn't start. Then the people at AAA kept bouncing my calls between 2 different cities and never sent my tow truck. At nearly 10 pm I got a ride home and wrote a nasty letter to AAA telling them that they'd better come up with some compelling explanation for why I should continue to use their services since they have failed me so horribly. The next several days I dealt with the pain of the injured back, plus taking a day off work to fix my stranded car.

How not to impress women

There is nothing like the indignity of working on your car in the parking lot of a gym connected with a University where beautiful 20-something girls in shorts and tank tops pass by all day long. It makes you want to say, "hey girl, don't look at me like that. I have a much cooler car at home in the garage that would make you think more highly of me if you ever saw it." And of course they would assume I was lying.

For the record, I'm not lying.

So, one month of no exercise coupled with eating out with friends during lunch or going home to sleep, plus the week of being sick as a dog, has ended. Its back to the pump and grind, to the carefully selected rhythm of cardio music, which I almost totally ignore. Except today, that is, where the voice of a girl saying "I like it with my feet back and my face down low" over and over again somehow caught my attention. I tried to Google the lyrics, but I can't find the song. One of the problems with pump class music is that they aren't exactly real songs. They take other people's music and redo it with different artists, sometimes combining several songs together. Oh well, it's not my style of music anyway. I was just curious.

I have no idea who today's instructor was. I had never seen her before. She said something about having recently had a baby. I couldn't tell anything about a baby. She said he is 4 months old. All I knew was she had a super tight set of abs and some huge breasts. I'm assuming the huge breasts are because she's still breast feeding. But I honestly have no idea. Either way, her entire body was in super tight shape, as compared to mine, which is most definitely not.


Example of distracting instructor

We did lots and lots of squats and lunges and jumps. And some deltoids. I tried to give it all I had, doing every rep with my best form and keeping up as best as I could. I did alright at first. And then my energy tank started to run low and the sweat began to pour out of me almost as fast as the US economy is leaking jobs.

And then, just as we reached the point where I was ready to fall over, we started doing push-ups. I should have rocked the push-ups, being a guy and all. But by that point I was totally out of gas. My chest and arms were willing, but my abs were not. They began to cave on me as I was straining out my reps. I started to look like the bow in a bow and arrow set. I tried and tried, but finally had to either drop to my knees or stop and breath. I chose to stop and breath. The black girl next to me kept on going.

I hated her for that.

I went back at it and tried to keep my body straight, but it didn't last long. Finally I gave in and let my knees touch the floor. Even then I wasn't lasting much longer. I was relieved to note that the black girl next to me also had her knees on the floor.

Yeah, you wimp!


Perfect Lunge

I try my best to do my squats and lunges with the best possible form despite my not having any apparent sense of balance at all. When I do lunges you really don't want to be the person next to me because I may fall over and take you out. I'm truly that bad. They say no balance is related to having no core muscles, but I think my ineptness goes beyond that. I mean, I definitely have no core muscles. There's no denying that. It's been months of me doing this class and still my abs show no sign of having improved at all. And I'm not even talking about when I look in the mirror. Screw the mirror. There's nothing to see there. I just mean when I'm doing the exercises and I look up I see my stomach muscles forming the upper arch of the Sydney harbour bridge. It looks ridiculous. And I've never noticed anyone else looking like that. It's just me with the horrifically useless stomach muscles.

My abs look like this, minus the opera house

I have honest to God thought about buying some of those muscle-stimulating electrodes and electrifying my stomach muscles while I work my abs just to see if I can force them to push down instead of forming the Appalachian mountains like they do. If I had a yellow t-shirt I could be the McDonald's golden arch. I really should contact them and see if they'd hire me. Give me a Ronald McDonald mask and a tight yellow shirt and I'm a human ad for their brand. I could be the McDonald's equivalent of Subway's Jarod.

Desperate Measures

Anyway, I started to die. At first I wasn't too concerned. I thought we were about done with class anyway. But then I looked at the clock. We were only 30 minutes into it. There was still 30 minutes more to go. And I was covered in sweat, wheezing like Mrs Jefferson, and about ready to collapse onto the floor.

YOU are totally wimping out

Meanwhile, the big-boobed, tight bodied instructor kept glancing my way. She did it all class long. I realize it has nothing to do with her being in any way attracted to me. They all have to make sure their students aren't passed out on the floor with a heart attack. But with the shape of her very female figure coupled with her flying ponytail acting as some kind of waving flag, it was constantly triggering some deep reproductive instinct in my brain somewhere and telling me "ALERT! ALERT! She's reproduction material!" Her steady glances were a real distraction. You would think that as exhausted as my body was, my genitals would be completely out of the equation here. Apparently not, though. I guess God considers the importance of reproduction to be too vital to ever fully let a man have a break from those instincts. Either that or I'm just really lonely.

Marisa Miller - clearly out of my league

I seem to have a problem with determining where I stand with women. There are women that make me feel that they are totally out of my league because they are so hugely attractive. But there are other women that I just have no idea where I stand with them. If they make me nervous at all then I seem to assume that I couldn't possibly make them nervous in return. I guess I assume that if they have impressed me that much then they must be out of my league and couldn't possibly be attracted to me. I believe this comes from my upbringing. My father used to say things to me like "what do you care if someone sees you naked? No one cares what you look like anyway" and lovely, helpful things like that as he held the bathroom door open. This did wonders for my self-image, as you might imagine. He wasn't what you'd call the most caring man. Actually, he always hated me. Both of my parents were big believers in putting their own children down as much as possible. They thought that parents who praised their own kids were big pretentious morons who were going to raise weak, useless brats. Ironically, our neighbors from across the street raised their daughters with the exact opposite view and all three of them are today very successful and happy, not to mention very beautiful, which I'm sure has helped with their success and happiness to some extent.


My neighbors daughters looked a lot like this

So anyway, after class I asked the instructor if she was signed up for the Warrior Dash later this month. It's a 5K race with endless obstacles, including climbing a wall, crawling through mud and leaping over fire. She said she was considering it. She has a friend who signed up and isn't going to be able to make it, so she offered her spot to her. She didn't sound like she was going to do it, though. While this conversation was going on, a beautiful blonde woman came in and began talking to her about a triathlon she had placed third in recently. And she encouraged me to enter one that is coming up. I am thinking about it. I know I will do terrible, and I might even drown in the attempt, but I'm bored with running and more running and I think I'd like to try something new for a change. A triathlon sounds like a good idea. The worst that it could do, I'm assuming, is kill me. I'm a lousy swimmer.

Warrior Dash - pit of fire obstacle