Tag Archives: gym

Another gym story

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Yesterday, after a long day being charming at a conference on how to survive a bad economy (I think “pray” was the most viable strategy), I went to a nearby branch of my gym to work away the blues. This branch is located in a very expensive and fancy hotel and shopping complex. It is definitely a “flagship” branch with all of the bells and whistles and expensive amenities.

One notable amenity is the modesty areas, where one can dress and undress in private.  A premium in a city where every square foot costs a fortune.  Yet, it did seem unnecessary in a place where only the beautiful, the buff and the European work out and parade around.  What is naked hair drying about?  Naked nose-blowing?  Naked blackberrying?  Ok, the truth is that if I receive a message on my blackberry, I want the sender to be fully clothed.  I don’t need any other image clouding my brain and destroying cells.  If someone were to email me that he or she was in the gym locker room (because, like bloggers, people will write just about anything in an email), I would stop reading and wait for about a half hour until I thought the person was dressed and then continue reading.

The worst?  Naked blackberrying while standing in front of the mirror.  

Me? I like just being regular weird and not doing any of that eccentric stuff.

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We live in a crowded city

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I went to the gym again tonight as part of my new mind-body balance regimen.  Who am I kidding?  Myself, of course.  But let me dream for another day and then crash-land into Hershey milk chocolate nuggets, take-out food and acne.  For two days, I have breathed calmly and deeply, in with nourishing oxygen, out with bad energy.  It started out great, until I realized I was breathing car exhaust and then started hyperventilating, but I digress.

In my karmatically balanced state, I walked into the locker room, certain I would rise above the bloggable moment.  Then I rationalized even a vegan sneaks a bacon rasher every now again.  I had to entertain this juicy rationalization because I have to report the bloggable moment.  I walked over to the toilet stalls to the left of the sinks.  At the sinks were two women — strangers it appears — one, brushing her teeth (bravo on the oral hygiene), the other shaving her underarms (obviously ANYthing can be done in public nowadays).

Let’s reflect on that.  Oh, and someone was eating a power bar of some sort not 5 feet away.  I guess I should have mentioned that you shouldn’t read this while eating.  My bad.  All that carbon monoxide I was deep-breathing to cleanse my body.  Hmmmm.

I happen to know where the chocolate nuggets are stashed. . . .

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My sister, speaker of the truth

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I bumped into my sister at the gym.  She said very excitedly and pleased, “you don’t look horrible!”  I looked at her.  “Well you started a new job and you don’t look bad. . . ” in a voice that suggested that “not bad” is the new “fabulous”.

Ok, so in the “new normal” of our lives, I am striving for looking “not bad.”  Good thing the floors and walls in the gym are padded.

I made sure to re-apply my lipstick often today.  “Not bad” is just not good enough.

But, seeing my new company ID picture, I know that my sister was just telling me the truth.  So, I realized that not looking horrible is now a goal and “not bad” a compliment.

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Sunday was a great day

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Sunday was my free day before my new job.

POB (partner of blogger) excused me from the otherwise obligatory lunch with her father and a children’s Hebrew music concert at our synagogue.  POB is TOO good to me.  I don’t deserve her but let’s keep that quiet (she hardly ever reads my blog often so I am not giving the secret away).

So, I watched cartoons with our son, went to the gym for a long, long time (I am still hurting Monday night), got a manicure, bought food for dinner with the extended family (my side) and started preparing it.  POB — G-d bless her — likes having my extended family over, even when I have slacked off ALL day. And they love her (what’s not to love?)

As an aside, it is a little bit of heaven to go to the gym without the stresses of having only 45 minutes to sweat, stretch, and be grossed out by those in the locker room.

The family came over and we started to reminisce about seminal moments of our clan gatherings at our aunt’s and uncle’s house in New Rochelle. And how we all thought we should have been consulted when they sold that house. That house was special because of the wonderful memories created there when the older generation was young and tall (and, yep, alive). Younger than their children are now.  It was a great fun to remember and laugh.

After everyone left, we cleaned up and my son was all ready for bed, he said, “Good luck tomorrow, E-Mom, I hope you make new friends and have someone to eat lunch with.”

I didn’t have time to get nervous about going to a new job the next day (ok, I didn’t get nervous until it was time to go to bed). 

It was a great day.

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Only in America and only in New York

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POST-SCRIPT:  The part about the beer is my imagination running away with me.

I get out of the 96th Street subway station at 94th Street (if you live outside NY, just trust me on this) when I go to the gym.  Invariably, I pass the same panhandler asking for change.  He is not earnest in his request (“spare change?”) because he sits on a standpipe in front of the storefronts and doesn’t really work the crowd.  I feel guilty not giving him something but I rationalize my hard-heartedness by concluding that if I were a beggar I would be the best damn beggar on the street and this guy is so mediocre at his job that he doesn’t deserve spare change.  And this beggar is rather, well, blasé about the whole begging thing.  You see why New Yorkers are a breed unto themselves; we even have jaded beggars.

So far, for a New Yorker, nothing new in this story.  YET.

As I pass him, and he is saying a half-hearted “spare change?”, his cell phone rings and he answers, “hey, where you at? I’ve been waiting for you.”

What, to go out for a beer?  Or does he meet his friend every night and while he is waiting, begs for change?  A kind of “fringe benefit” or “value added” for his wait time?

I couldn’t make this stuff up and I am really sure I wouldn’t want to.

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Just the G-d-Awful Flu

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Since Friday, I have been felled by the flu.  I don’t have mad sow flu, or H1N1, as it is supposedly called.

I am now recovering from the usual, seasonal, G-d-awful flu.  It happens.  The non-designer, non-pandemic one.  I even had a flu shot which I have to say probably made it less horrendous than it could have been.

My sister the doctor was concerned that I was dying of the plague because I didn’t blog for days.  Yes, I had to have been pretty hard hit not to blog, or, for that matter, to pay a shiva call to my friend whose mother’s funeral I attended last week (see prior blog entry).

The flu, once medicated, is the moral equivalent of a stubbed toe.  Yet, I longed to hear my mother say, “my poor tsakele, if I could have it for you I would,” as she looked into my eyes and caressed my cheek in that way that mothers do that make you feel better just by having them there.

POB, partner of blogger, has been in the trenches with our son, getting him from place to place, while I lied in bed doing the least I could do.  Really, the least I could do.  And she is a trooper (who is now coughing, because I share too much).

I took a walk yesterday because I was becoming self-radicalized watching CNN and MSNBC in between naps over the last few days.  I was woozy and thought it would be a great idea to go to the gym.  (I need a personal attendant.)  I went to the gym and did nothing except watch the people who are able to go to the gym on a Monday at 3:30pm, while I scrubbed with Purell.  Luckily the medication dried me out so much that I neither blew my nose or coughed much.  One general observation:  the beautiful, the buff and the young don’t go to the gym in the afternoon.  The older, schleppier and grayer do.

I left the gym having not sweat or done anything to shore up my sagging self and walked south for no reason (ok, no sane reason).  I went into PC Richards and Sons and looked at Plasma TVs.  I thought maybe if I bought a big plasma TV, I could tell POB that it was the delirium that did it.  Even in my delirium I knew that was stupid, yet wishful, thinking.

Friends tried to make me feel better by emailing me stories of the weird and blog-worthy.   My old friend started out his email by writing: “My dear son didn’t really do anything wrong (that’s what every parent says).”  Followed by, wait for it . . .

“Gotcha!!!”

Walk-weary, I took to my bed and resumed doing the least I could do.

Dr. SOB (Sister of Blogger), are you satisfied that I am on the road to recovery?

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Deja Vu All Over Again

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I saw my sister in the gym tonight.  Actually, I bumped into a trainer just outside the gym who told me my sister was working out.  I looked shocked; the trainer then looked puzzled.  You see, my sister has a stress fracture in her foot and should not be on an elliptical machine (and that is all she does at the gym when I am not around to coach her about weights).  I march upstairs in my “street clothes” to confront my sister.  I go to the heart of the matter and ask her whether she did, in fact, get her medical degree through a correspondence course with an off-shore medical school. In our family, that is the sum total of trash-talking.

After having laid down the gauntlet, my sister sputters some rationalizations, all of which I reject in an imperious way (after all I am a doctor, too — ok, a juris doctor).  I give her THE LOOK (Mom’s look of disappointment).  She doesn’t flinch.  She is not my sister.  My sister would have flinched.  I am confronted by the realization that my sister’s body is inhabited by an alien who is not scared of THE LOOK. THE LOOK proves the old adage, “if looks could kill . . . ” Well, not exactly, but THE LOOK with the eyes of my mother can really make a person plead for forgiveness. No sign of recognition by the alien inhabiting my sister.

Still, she knows about “our” Dad’s procedure tomorrow.  Clever aliens, these pod people.

So, I test this alien with other facts that my sister should know.  I mention some things I had written in my blog.  She is a little hazy about some of my latest entries.  But she does zero in on some with incredible accuracy.  I am not convinced yet but I leave to regroup and give the alien a false sense that she fooled the sister of her host body.  I come back up and flash an old picture of my parents and my sister at camp visiting day, circa 1969.  The alien looks at the picture, sighs and hugs me.

Maybe my sister is inhabited by an alien, but it is a really endearing alien.  Maybe the alien can heal her stress fracture.  Maybe the alien can help with my sagging neck.  After all, aliens have special powers that can conquer humanity, or at least that is true in the movies.

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Another Gym Moment

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We had had friends over for dinner Saturday night and good food and wine doesn’t not go gently on the body anymore. 

So, Sunday, at the stroke of 11:39am, I set off for a run.  I cut short the run at a mile, because, well, the chill in the air was not helping the creaks in my knees and the gym is warmer.  So I trot into the gym and, thinking about my new health regimen, I get one of those parsley, beet, cucumber, kale, blah blah blah drinks with some extra stuff for energy and focus.  It is a gross green color and therefore it must be good for me, right?

I drink it up as I am inputting my weight and my age into the machine (I pause for a moment to shake my head at the weight creep up the scale) and I notice that I have a faint after-taste of garlic.  Aaaargh.  Garlic was not listed in the ingredients to this elixir.  Luckily, I have one of those damp towels with eucalyptus in it (who knows why, but I took one), so I can breathe into it and not offend others near me.

This time I choose the recumbent bike, so that there is really no way I can fall off this machine, even if I faint from the garlic and the eucalyptus.  The woman next to me is ten years older and is going further and faster on her bike.  And she is burning more calories.  It’s ok, I rationalize because if I went faster, I would sweat more garlic, and SHE would keel over.  So my slow pace is actually altruistic.  And not only that, I am breathing through my eucalyptus towel to keep the garlic smell quotient to a minimum.

All of this altruism, eucalyptus and garlic is making me tired and I still 25 minutes to go (I have only been pedaling for five minutes, but it was a complicated and emotional five minutes).  The Marathon is on the TV and now I am psyched up to keep going.  Then I turn to another TV and see John King on CNN asking dumb questions instead of tough questions and I get agitated.  My bike starts making weird clanking noises.  They are loud enough for the people next to me to look over because they can hear the noises over their iPods.  The older woman is staring at me and I want to say, “hey, I am breathing into this stupid towel so you don’t faint from garlic, and you are running faster and further than I am, so you want to make something of my clanking bike?”  But of course I don’t.  I smile sheepishly as if I had been flatulent and everyone can smell it. 

Oh, will the degradation ever end for this schlepper at the gym?  No, I fear. 

I am destined for every gym visit to be — how shall I say? — “schl-epic”.

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Why I often focus on politics

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So, I focus on politics which is sometimes a downer.  But I can’t write about the Seinfeldian experiences in my family life because many of them read the blog.

In talking about a future gathering, the purpose of which is to pick at the emotional scabs over a wobbly relationship, I advised the person to wear a HazMat suit because although the people present vary in intensity, all will want to ask inappropriately invasive questions.  But I can’t go into the background because I don’t want to be excommunicated from my family.

So, you see my predicament.  I find people endlessly fascinating, but I need to keep it out of the family.

That is why I am going back to the gym and try to take public transportation.  Because the Seinfeldian experiences happen to me or to strangers and then it is fair game.

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Bruised, but energized

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I arrived at the gym at the crack of 11:30am on Sunday, ready to get back into shape.

Previously, I described my body as a pear with rhombus touches.  Right now, I feel like a square rhombus, which is a fatter, squatter, diamond shape.  I am going for the diamond shape rhombus — I am not getting any taller but I can shrink the girth.  Less girth, more mirth.  Somehow that isn’t slogan-y enough.  Let me try that again in sing-song perky voice — More Mirth!! Less Girth!!!  Naw.

How about:  It is time to put the T-O-N-E in my muscles.  (Except there is no “t”, “o” or “n” in “muscle”.)  Don’t I sound like an infomercial?  [imagine someone with perky, sing-song voice singing “All right, okay, waste that waist away!!” while doing something 1980s like jazzercise.]  (Didn’t some trainer of C-list celebrities say something like that?)

I still looked dweeby in my gym outfit because, while the length of my work-out pants covered my unshaven legs, they were toooooo form fitting.   (Here’s the sad truth — these once weren’t form fitting work-out pants.)  And my work-out shirt, which thank G-d was not sleeveless, wasn’t long enough. 

I did both cardio and weights.  I hurt today.  That is an understatement.  My body is SCREAMING at me.  Yet, I will go at it again, today, or, errrrrr, tomorrow.  But DEFINITELY, today or tomorrow.  Or Wednesday.  But I am committed, clearly.

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