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It staggers me how often they have to change the shower curtains at the gym. On Monday I got into the shower, pulled the shower curtain closed only to find I needn’t have bothered due to a huge slash through it. Today all the shower curtains have been replaced with shiny new ones. I give them 2 months before they’re broken, half pulled off the hooks and generally in need of replacing again. Must cost them a fortune.

For some reason my brain keeps thinking I only need 5-6 hours sleep; my body strongly refutes this claim. Anyway, 6am saw me awake with a decidedly dippy tummy which really prevented any going back to sleep. As a result I’m up, dressed, breakfasted and now in the gym where I join you from a recumbent cycling machine 5 minutes into my last excercise. Let me tell you, blogging while peddling isn’t as easy as it sounds. Was hoping to get a swim in but i don’t think that’s a good idea given this mornings ailement.

Anyhoos, today see me luncheoning again (such a tough life), noodling round Oxford Street and Camdan, going to physio and playing pool. Should be a fun day.

Right: 7 more kilometres and I’m done.

OK, so it’s been rather a long time since I’ve been to the gym, although this is mainly because I buggered my knees up at Easter and my physio has said not to go to the gym (they also said not to go clubbing and spend hours on the dancefloor for a few months, but what the hell do they know?). Anyway, this week see’s my return to the gym. Last time I went I forgot my towel so this morning I laid everything out: shoes, socks, shorts, tshirt, headphones, iPod, brush, shampoo, shower gel, hair band, towel, gym card, hand towel, drink. All this was packed into the bag and I headed off to work.

Fast forward a few hours and I arrive at the gym, get out my gym clothes and my padlock… ah. Crud. I did toy with the idea of just leaving my stuff in the locker unlocked by my wallet and iPhone were in there and I’m not sure I’d survive the loss of my iPhone (to misquote Combichrist who, coincidently, misquote the US Army, so in other words to totally make it up: this is my iPhone, it is my life.). ‘If only I had a padlock’ I thought and then, suddenly, right in front of me, hanging on the coat hook was a padlock. This kind of crap happens to me quite a lot, I am a seriously lucky person sometimes so the [other] gods must smile on me. Anyway, I waited for a few minutes to make sure it didn’t belong to anyone getting changed and then swiped it. The gods, it would appear, are cruel; the padlock was broken. Not wanting to risk it I went back to reception and splashed £6 on a crappy lock.

Workout wise things went went. I was expecting to be out of practice as it’s been a while but I’ve been keeping up my Tai Chi and I’d put together a new gym play list that was working out quite well. It was one hell of a shock, therefore, midway through a quite fast song while I was in ‘the zone’ and precisely 20 minutes into my cross training that the thing decided I’d had enough and went into cooldown mode. The resistance setting halved and I damn near fell off it. Looks like I’ll have to rejig the playlist slightly to make it just over 20 minutes long and not have the cutoff fall in the middle of something fast.

Once again the changing rooms seemed to have a couple of older blokes doing that wandering around naked being all pleased with their bodies thing. Just wait 10 years, you’ll have spindly legs a big gut and look like a frog if held by your ankles. Time is a cruel mistress like that. Actually, she’s less of a cruel mistress and more of an evil cow who hates everyone and everything… a bit like a female version of me… I wonder if she’s single.

Anyway, despite playing up a bit midway through my bike ride (which I then decided to abort rather than pushing them too hard) the knees appear to be OK. Yay them. [Parents: stop reading here] Hopefully they’ll hold up through a whole club night without me having to neck a couple of voltarol

OK, so I’ve been going to the gym regularly at least twice a week month for a quantity of time now and I’m pleased to report the following:

• I now weigh over 2Kg less more than I did when I started.
• I now have the physique of an Olympic 100m butterfly swimmer pie eater.
• I now have the stamina of a marathon runner 100 year old 120 a day smoker.

Yes, clearly something isn’t quite going right here. Obviously I am not pushing myself hard enough and need to work on blasting my lats (whatever the hell that means) or something, but since I’m unlikely to stop doing what I’m doing already I’m going to have to resort to checking the pennies (more on that in a later post) and getting me a personal sadist to show me what I should be doing. That way I can find out that perhaps the gym isn’t for me, continue paying them £30odd a month to use the pool twice a year and not bother about how fat I get

It’s a new year, everyone has made their new years resolutions and, inevitably, getting fit and loosing weight features high in the list. This is quite evident in the number of people at the gym today, however, I have a few hints and tips for you:

• Parking in the disabled spot when you’re clearly not disabled to save yourself a walk to the door of a gym is ironic on so many levels I can’t even get my head round it.
• Deodorant is not a substitute for a shower after a workout, no matter how much you use.
• Your body is not that great. OK, for a 50 year old it possibly looks good, but I really don’t want to have you prancing and strutting around the changing rooms stark naked  so we all get an eyeful. My eyes! Ze goggles, zey do nuthink!
• You don’t need to use the entirety of the bench to get changed. Leave some space for others.
• Pissing in the showers is not funny. Not even slightly. Grow up, learn how to use a toilet or wear a nappy.
• Bragging about pissing in the shower just makes us realise what an arse you are. See above.

I give you… two weeks before you start making excuses not to go and a month before you stop going all together

So, bad news for you lot as blog output is down due to me watching House on the shiny while on the train instead of whittering away on my laptop. Still, good news for me. Now I no longer need to troll around with the Urban Geek Pack I can now take my gym bag to work. This means I have no excuse for not going (of late it’s been cold and dark which saps the will to leave the house once you’re in it. No swimming though. To cold and I have a cold which is never condusive to a dip. At some point I need to sort out a resistance program for my arms. Waving swords about is killing the muscles in them

I’ve been neglecting the gym of late due to various excuses (the ‘doing 60 laps in the pool is causing my eyes to burn for 12 hours afterwards’ has now gone due to some snazzy new goggles with mirrored fonts… I just can’t see anything any more ) , however, I did manage to drag my sorry hide down there on Wednesday (failed to do 60 laps as I’d not been for over a week and was out of practice) and today (where I managed to kill myself on the cross trainer for 35 minutes on quite a high setting… gotta love going to the gym in a shitty mood ). Good thing is I actually miss it if I don’t go and have started looking forward to going and actually actively wanting to go. Down side is the shampoo I’m using (some designer crud that came with the sponge bag I bought for the gym) is not doing nice things for my hair (neither is the chlorine in the pool for that matter) so I need to either find some Head and Shoulders in nice small bottles or, ideally, find something that handles chlorine well in a nice small bottle.

Going to the gym in a bad mood is a bad idea. You don’t so much use the machines as attack them. Your choice of music (or at least my choice of music) turns to the loud and aggressive which will invariable have a very fast tempo, which leads to an extreme workout. Most embarrassing, however, if the fact that this kind of workout seriously elevates your heart rate and if you ignore the little red flashing warning light on the bike you end up with one of the gym staff explaining to you how a heart rate of 220 is not something I want to sustain for too long a period of time and perhaps I might want to ease the cycling back from 180rpm to between 80 and 120.

Still, I managed to get 0.75km done on the crosstrainer, and 7.5km done on the bike. No swimming as I’d run out of drink by that point and was also wanting to leave a little bit of energy for the walk home. I might see if I can do 1km on the crosstrainer and 10km on the bike tomorrow as the pool is causing my eyes to get very sore and the goggles I’ve ordered don’t arrive until next week. If I take it at a slightly more sedate pace I might be able to do it. We’ll see how it goes.

The blog is not the only thing that’s been suffering in the past couple of weeks, I’ve also been rather naughty and missed 2 sessions at the gym. In my defense I did have a really nasty cold on Thursday (not quite man-flu, but getting there) and I’ve been having a ‘do nothing, can’t be arsed to leave the house, let alone do nearly 10Km’s worth of exercise few days’. Last Tuesday I was very good and managed 600m on the cross trainer, 6Km on the bike and 60 lengths in the pool. Sunday I thought I’d just see how far I could go on the bike, which turned out to be not very far…

I was supposed to be seeing my parents on Sunday but I was out Friday night and Saturday night (such a social butterfly, I know) so I got up late. Instead I packed my stuff, made a fresh liter of squash for my drink bottle and headed to the gym. I got changed, plugged in the iPod and headed for the machines. Normally at this point I’d put my drink into the drink holder and get on the machine. Today, for some strange reason, I thought I’d put my drink somewhere near the drink holder and let go, allowing it to fall to the floor and disgorge and entire liter of squash over the floor. Which was nice. I then spent 5 minutes mopping the drink up with my towel (didn’t really do a good job), then another 5 minutes doing a very fast 3km on the bike before leaving with a “Wow, worked up a good sweat there, I meant to do a hard and fast workout and I’m not running away before anyone notices I spilled my drink everywhere” look on my face. To make sure I didn’t bump into anyone else who may have seen me drop my drink I got changed without showering, dashed home, threw my clothes in the wash and showered there. Ah, the shame .
I’m assuming when I go tomorrow the mess will be cleaned up and I can do my normal routine without making a complete arse of myself

OK, so we were a bit naughty on Sunday choosing to just swim rather than doing anything on the machines. That said, I got somewhere between 40 and 50 lengths (810 meters-ish) before I lost out to cramp. The irony was I was going to try and do two very fast lengths, waited for the second hand to hit 12, pushed off as hard as I could… and then got severe cramp in my right leg. Ended up doing the two lengths with one leg (I wasn’t going to let people know I had cramp) at a much slower time than I was hoping for. Also put the kibosh on doing any more.

Today was more productive, managed to seriously up the amount of time on the machines (mainly by not killing myself on the cross trainer in the first 5 minutes - isn’t pacing yourself wonderful ).

Todays stats are:

Cross Trainer: 0.5km
Bike: 5km (+2km)
Pool: 50 lengths  (900m - +20 lengths)

Since everyone has been pointing out how crap the figures my scales give me are we’ll stick to just weight:  84.2Kg (down 1.7Kg )