Back to the Gym

I signed up for the 2014 Cotton Row Run. This doom and failure is becoming an annual event for me. I mean, the race has always been an annual event, but my failure to run it in a decent time is a recent development. Recent increasingly being a relevant term since I've failed to even break 30 minutes in my last 2 (?) tries. I'm not going to mix words. Failing to run a 5K in less than 30 minutes is just awful. It's not an achievement to be proud of. It's not even average for my age group. It's barely better than walking. It's awful.

Nevertheless, I have returned to the gym. Naturally I am doing everything wrong. I need to slowly and steadily build up my running to a reasonable distance. And THEN work on my speed and power. But the thing is, I'm stubborn. And stupid. I know I can run the distance. That's not the issue. I mean, as long as nothing breaks or tears or pulls or catches fire before I cross the finish line. So I'm ignoring the whole "build up to the distance and work on your pace and form" thing. The first day back in the gym I ran. And my knee swelled up like a helium balloon. And it hurt while I ran, too. Naturally I went straight back to the gym the very next day. Because that's what you do, right? No, but I did it anyway. I just didn't get on the treadmill the 2nd day. I got on the elliptical instead.

Meanwhile, I supplement my runs/ellipticals/biking with weightlifting. I'm just doing 3 sets of weak weights and low effort lifting. But being more out-of-shape than Barack Obama right now even these weak weights and minimal sets has left me sore.

So yesterday I cranked up the treadmill and blasted through a mile at the race pace I'd love to do during the Cotton Row, except that obviously I'd have to hold that pace for quite a bit longer than just a mile. There's the catch.

Today I cranked up the treadmill even faster. But I was so tired from yesterday that I couldn't hold it, so I Treadmill Fartleked instead. I sprinted, then walked, then sprinted, etc. I did this until my right running shoe exploded. I know this sounds like a joke, the sort of sarcastic thing a blogger would say, but trust me, it isn't. I was sprinting along when I shoe went BLAP and the sole flew off and sailed like a Martina Hingis serve for an ace. This put a slight kink in my sprinting plans and also made me stop running to laugh. But then I had to get off the treadmill and get on a bike. By this point I was out of gas anyway, so I did some bench press and abs and stretched.

Now I have to find a new pair of running shoes. And maybe ice my legs a bit. And stretch some more. And also I should probably search the gym to find my sole before someone else does and thinks one of the women lost her diaphragm in the weightroom somehow.

Aside from my exploded Reebok I have another problem. I clearly weigh too much for my bad knee. It hurts if I don't run just right. And then it swells and hurts like hell. I'm too fat for my knee and my running shoe. I blew it up. My knee isn't going to get better. 2 surgeries have made sure of that. The worse it gets, the lighter I need to be. Of course, that's not likely to happen. But I have to try. Otherwise there isn't going to be any more races on this gimpy, swollen disaster.

Workout Wednesday

This staying in a motel thing is killing me.

Let me correct myself.

This staying in a motel combined with a shockingly cold Winter and no gym to work out in is killing me.

Let me tell you what I've been reduced to. In between typing this I am doing arm curls with a bar stool. Prior to bar stool arm curls I was doing pushups in the filthy motel floor. In order to make the pushups worthwhile I have to clear off the one comfy chair in this prison cell and put my feet in it, giving me a decline angle that puts more focus on my upper chest, while simultaneously forcing me to press my entire face into that filthy motel carpet. For lower body exercise, what with it being 11 degrees outside, I am doing unweighted squats while watching the crappy TV. Thank God CougarTown is on because the mind numbing boredom of weightless squats could potentially make my head explode.

Also, I'm still sick. Technically I shouldn't be doing any of this exercise stuff. I should be napping. But I can feel my muscles atrophying away to nothing. I can FEEL it.

Today is my birthday. I'm spending my birthday alone in a dirty motel room doing exercises that cause me to press my face into a filthy nasty carpet and lift furniture over and over again. This is my life.

Finding a New Gym

Old injury forces me to take up cycling

So, in case I haven't mentioned it already, and I can't recall if I have or not, I have moved from the city I was living in when I started this blog to a new city. I gave up my job and my awesome gym with the Bodypump classes and college girls to move to a city I don't care for where I took a higher paying and much more demanding job. I joined a gym near my house, but I rarely went to it after sustaining a calf injury that seemed to just hang around bothering me forever. That calf injury led to me digging my old road bike out of the shed and cleaning it up to ride. I rode until winter when the darkness would overtake my neighborhood before I had even arrived home from work. There are few street lights where I live, so riding at night is not an option. 

I have not run or trained at all since my last race in September or October. I can't remember which month it was. I did manage to injure my back during that time, though. So awesome.

So, I joined a new gym last week. From the outside and looking at their website it looks very similar to my old gym at the University. But walking around I see a significant difference or two.

Old city's average citizen

In my previous city, the average citizen there has at least an undergraduate degree. There are a high number of people with masters degrees. Doctorates are also fairly common. Almost everyone either works for the defense department or NASA in some capacity, whether they are employed directly by them or through a contracted company.

New city's average citizen (skin color may vary)

In this city, the average citizen here has at least one arrest for a criminal offense of some sort. There are a high number of gang members. Drug dealers are also fairly common. A lot of people here don't work at all and simply draw welfare.

Old gym's average female client

At my old gym, being on a college campus, most of the females were college girls and somewhat pretty. I'm not saying I gawked at them or anything. I was there to work out, after all. Observing the female population wasn't really the purpose of being there. But attractive females weren't rare.

New gym's average female client

At my new gym, being in this city where beauty is harder to find than crack cocaine, I didn't see a single attractive female anywhere in the gym at all. To be fair, I just got there and haven't even worked out there yet. I just took the tour and looked around. Fairly empty gym, except for the treadmills, etc. No attractive females at all. Not one.

Old gym's pool

At my old gym, the swimming pool was enormous and always filled with people swimming laps. I never got a chance to use it.

New gym's pool

At my new gym, the swimming pool is large enough for doing laps. It was filled with old white guys, all of whom had beards, one of whom was oddly splashing over and over and over, like a mentally ill person or a child might do. Only 2 men were swimming laps.

Old gym during lunch hour

At my old gym, during lunch every single day there were workout classes with a lead trainer to guide you, including bodypump and spin classes. There were also plenty of classes early in the morning and after work, running from 5 to 7 each night.

New gym during lunch hour

At my new gym, there are absolutely no classes of any kind during lunch. None. There are 2 classes offered at 5 am and again after work at 5:30 pm. 2 classes.

At my old gym, the entire building was shiny and new, even if the equipment wasn't necessarily all that new. Most of it was, but not all of it, and it didn't really matter. The main thing was that it worked. The free weight area had a steady stream of dedicate athletes, many of whom were college students, and sometimes it could get crowded despite the enormous floor space available for the free weights.

At my new gym, the entire building looks damp inside, somehow. I don't know how to explain it. I think it has been there awhile. The equipment looks perfectly fine. There was absolutely no one working out in the free weight area. Not a single person. The person showing me around said that was unusual, but couldn't explain why it was completely vacant.

Old city - I have friends

In my old city, I had a large group of friends, all of whom worked out and some of whom compete in triathlons. They had me considering attempting to compete in a triathlon myself.

New city - I am alone

In this new city, I don't have a lot of friends. Some of them work out, but I don't know which ones. None of them are into triathlons at all. If I do train for a triathlon, chances are I'll enter one in my old city and go there to race, perhaps hooking up with some of my old friends for support.

Today at lunch I was planning to go to this new gym and give it a try. I haven't worked out in months, as I said. I know it won't be epic. I packed my gym back with all my old stuff in preparation, but I can't find my lock for the lockers. I have a pack of 3 combination locks, all with the same combination for in case I lose one and need another and don't want to have to learn a new combination. But now I can't find any of them. They're all together somewhere. So instead of going to the gym, today during lunch I'll be going to the store to buy new locks.

Yeah, I'm off to a roaring start, and not terribly motivated.

Workout Update: The Day After

I cannot bend my arms!

Ouch!

Back In Black

So, it's been, what, nearly a month since I was last well enough to go to the gym and attempt a workout? Well, not that I'm well, exactly, but I went anyway out of sheer frustration and impatience.

Over the weekend I had some ... er ... bathroom incidents that gave me the impression that whatever has made me sick is not entirely cleared up yet. I nearly crapped in the floor of WalMart. It was OK, though. I was in the toilet-related aisle, where they keep the plungers, etc.

Walmart even has vampires

Last Thursday, just out of frustration at not being able to get to the gym for the past 3 weeks or so, I did some push ups and chin ups and tricep extensions using my own personal dumbbells while watching TV. The push ups were OK. The tricep extensions I rocked. The chin ups were an embarrassment. I haven't done a chin up in about 2 years. I think my body forgot how and was hoping I wouldn't ever try to remember. I'm not one to be so easily put off, though, so I pulled up a chair and forced out several sets of negatives. And they hurt like hell.

Today in bodypump class apparently I had been gone for so long that everyone forgot my face. People looked at me like a stranger when I walked in. And I got stuck in a spot between several female fitness fanatics who made me look like a quadriplegic in comparison to them. As if that wasn't bad enough, a woman showed up late and just basically climbed up my ass and started working out right behind me. Seriously, when the classroom is full, go lift some free weights or something. Don't give me an enema just because you can't find a spot to set up your stuff. Either that or warn me that you're going to give me an enema and I'll let you have my spot and I'll go lift free weights. I need to anyway. It's been over 6 months since I was doing any heavy lifting and that is way too long.

Sagging push up

I was total crap today. I did OK with the squats until my knee started complaining. I was great with the overhead presses. I even did OK with the weighted lunge/overhead press combos. But by the time we got to the push ups and abs I was collapsing in the middle. I almost need a little jack to put under my stomach to hold it up while I'm doing my push ups. I think it would help.

My knee bothered me enough that at one point the instructor looked over at me and said those horrible words that no one wants to hear directed at them, "are you all right?"

"Yes," I nodded and kept rubbing my knee and wishing everyone would quit looking at me.

Show off!

The woman to my left was cranking out push ups like she was in the marines. And her ab work was like something from one of those TV fitness commercials where everyone looks perfect and never gets tired. If I weren't so afraid of sharting I might've been tempted to release a fart in her direction just to slow her down. But as I have been a human butt rocket for the past month or so, I thought better of it. No farting for me for awhile.

I was informed this past weekend that milk is not good for you because it contains an insane amount of sugar in the form of lactose. I have to be honest, I didn't know that lactose was sugar. And I also don't know if the lactose form of sugar is the same as any other sugar and affects you the same way. Do any of you know much about this? I'd really like to know because I drink a lot of milk. Do I need to stop?

How can this be bad for me?

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

Working Out by Falling Flat on My Face

I meant to do that

Well, I worked out again today. And I was just as weak and lousy as Monday. I had even promised the trainer that I would be better on Wednesday than I was on Monday, but clearly I lied. I sucked wind SOOOO badly. I was surrounded by beautiful girls and all I could think was "quit using up all the air in here! I need it."

This has been a lousy week so far. I haven't gotten enough of anything accomplished. I seem to have the organizational skills of a stereotypical dumb blonde. Meanwhile, several blondes are kicking my ass in my workout class, including the blonde trainer.

My Trainer

My trainer has blonde hair, blue eyes and a tiny little girlie voice like a doll, and yet she is all ripped muscle and kicks my ass in workout after workout. I have no pride left. I don't even care anymore.

Next month they are closing the locker room for renovations. So that means the men have to shower in the 'Family Locker Room' which I don't even know where that is. I don't know if they are renovating the womens' locker rooms at the same time, but if they are then that puts us all in that family locker room together, and you know that won't go over well with the women.

First of all, the women don't want the men seeing them naked, because they know we want to.

Secondly, the women don't want to see the men naked because, lets be honest, no one wants to see that. We don't even want to see each other's junk and we've all got the same stuff. It's a mostly unspoken rule in the men's locker room that you don't walk around naked for too long or someone is going to yell at you because it's ugly.

So I did lousy at my workout today. This time, though, the trainer didn't come over to me after class to see if I was OK and talk to me. At one point I had actually deluded myself into thinking she was repeatedly talking to me because she found me attractive. But then I noticed that she didn't seem overly thrilled when I asked her about the songs she was playing and offered to provide some cool tunes by The Heavy. That's when I noticed that all our conversations were about whether or not I was going to be alright or die from a heart attack in her class.

SLAM!

I would have thought that after 7 months of doing this exhausting workout I would be a lot better at it by now. Apparently not, though. Chronic lack of sleep seems to play a role in not improving and I have that in spades. No matter how hard I try to get myself into bed and asleep by a decent hour something always seems to pop up and take a shocking amount of my time and then suddenly its way late.

Did I mention my problem with a lack of organization skills?

Wait, what are we doing?

Monday

I had intended to make my first post after returning from vacation a series of photos and maybe some video from the beach, but as all of that is on my laptop and I am nowhere near my laptop, it'll have to wait.

It's cloudy today, which has cooled things off nicely. That's a real relief after a week burning in the July sun at the beach. At least we had the ocean there, but now that I'm home again there is no ocean to jump into when the heat gets to be overwhelming. And the air conditioning in my car hasn't been all that good lately. I probably need to go have it recharged.

Today is another bodypump class. I haven't been in a week and a half. I'm not enthused about going today, and if anyone were to call me up and say, "let's do lunch" I'd skip out on class and go eat some very unhealthy restaurant food instead. Yes, I know I'm a bad athlete, but I've been a bad athlete for awhile now. That's how I ended up in bodypump class in the first place.

Depending on how humiliating my workout is today I may update this post with more information. Otherwise, I've just farted and judging from the way it is fogging up the windows in my office I suspect I need to go have a sit-down on the toilet.

Cheers!

Preparing for Race Day

I have a race to run, and once again, I have not trained the least little bit. Last month I was supposed to run a 5K with/against a friend of mine. I didn't go running even one time to prepare for it. I ended up having to go out of town anyway, so in the end it didn't matter. But here I am, one month later, and I have another race to run. Once again, no training has been done.

To be fair, I've been going to the gym and working cardio pretty hard. If the race consisted of doing 100 squats while holding dumbbells in each hand and then whipping out 50 pushups, I could jam on that. Unfortunately for me, though, it doesn't. It just consists of someone shooting a starting pistol and then me running as fast as I can for 3.1 miles. There's an even longer race 2 hours before this one, a 6.2 mile event that I would have signed up for, but didn't due to it's outrageous 7 a.m. start time.

I'm sorry, but if I'm going to bust my ass running in blazing sun and soaking wet humidity, I'm not getting up at the crack of dawn and making sure I'm on the starting line and ready to go at 7 a.m. I just can't be expected to do that. I'm no morning person and running early in the morning has never been my thing.

My event begins at 9, after the longer 10K race has finished. My friend was angry when I told him I'd signed up for the 5K instead of the 10K because he'd hoped I'd run the 10K with him, but truth be told, we would not have been striding along, side-by-side, for much of that race even if we began it together. Especially considering that I haven't run at all in over 2 years.

So today I'm supposed to go to the gym and do my workout. There's a perfectly good classroom waiting for me, with a nice blonde instructor to push me till I puke. Or I can go upstairs and get on a treadmill and see how fast I can run 3.1 miles while going absolutely nowhere. It's boring and I forgot to bring my iPod. And I've never used those treadmills upstairs before, so I don't know how they work. I assume I'll be able to figure them out.

What I can't decide is whether or not I even want to.

UPDATE: I got to the gym and found that I had lost my combination lock. I didn't feel comfortable putting my clothes, wallet and keys in a locker without a lock, even though many others do it, so I went home and ran instead.

It was somewhat hot today and extremely humid. I haven't run in 2 years and it sure showed. I wasn't very fast. My lower back started hurting me before I'd completed the first mile. I tried to concentrate on my form, keeping it correct as best as I could. But I kept catching myself slowing down to a crawl on even the slightest inclines. Then my knee started to bother me. Then my hip joined in.

I was slow and pathetic and had the song "Psycho," by Puddle of Mudd, stuck in my head the entire time for some odd reason. According to a route mapping tool I found, I ran 3.3 miles, which is slightly longer than the race I'm preparing for, so that's a good thing, at least. My running shorts rubbed all the skin off in the inside of my right upper thigh, so there's very little chance of my running again tomorrow. I have basically 2 or 3 more runs left to me before the race, at this rate, and I doubt I'm going to improve much with so little training. I at least want to complete the race with a nearly respectible time considering my 2 years off, and I'd like to be able to enjoy it, which means hopefully I won't be in as much pain as I was today.