August 17th, 2005

Illustmaker me

On two months as gym-goer

I think two months is long enough to be absolutely certain that I am not a gym person. I go in nearly every day, and I still feel like I'm goddamned Mars, except that I'd like to go to Mars, and gym is more like purgatory.

Down fifteen pounds or so, which is about half a drop in the bucket. But hey, my jeans are too big, which is a good thing, except it means I have to buy new ones, and the gym is sucking too much money to do it.

I am convinced that the endorphin rush is a total urban myth. I've never felt anything remotely like an happiness in the gym, though there's a certain grim intellectual pleasure in each 10% completed on the treadmill every day. Each time I make it past the "Workout is 50% complete" mark, I grit my teeth and say, "All right, you made it this far, you may as well get through the rest." Okay, not the most inspiring of mottoes. But what the heck, it gets me through. And I've taken the steady speed of the workout from 3.2 miles an hour to 3.5 miles an hour on a cross country program with different inclines. (Yes, I am enough of a wuss that I'm actually pleased with myself for making it up to 3.5 miles an hour.) I was trying to go up to a jog for awhile--just a minute or two at a time--but it made my bad ankle hurt and my knees ached all day. I'm too fat to jog. Ergo, I walk 3.5 miles an hour.

More pleasurable is the fact that I'm apparently stronger than the skinny girls. Accidental Xena moment aside, I almost always raise the weight level if one of them was there before me. I may be fat, but I can lift between fifty and a hundred pounds, depending on which machine it is. I've added from ten to twenty pounds to each machine I use in the month I've been using them, even (finally, yesterday morning), the camber curl thing, which was a real challenge at first. And I manage all my stupid crunches, though that's such a lousy pain that I don't have any pleasure at all in it, though I've discovered it's quite comfy to rest lying down in the great big exercise ball between sets. Maybe I should get one of those to sleep on. (Not.)

Now, I have to cut down the calories more, because the weight loss is stalled. Blech. Too much that's easy to get quickly while I'm out is high-caloric.
courage of padfoot text by Jack Ichijouj


Well, I bought more userpic space. I am a sheep. I only have 26 icons, so I can start making them like crazy. I uploaded all of them that I have sitting around on my hard drive. Using my favorite of the ones I'd forgotten about.