Workouts this week / 336 days till the Spartan!

Chatty description coming up, after family obligations. Briefly: good news, I worked out! Bad news, I'm still fat.

...Okay, here's the wordiness.

The two pix below are snapshots I took of the screen on the treadmill stairclimber Nordictrack whatever that machine is at the gym, where you get on it and you do this sort of gliding motion with your feet, while at the same time you busily push on this lever-like thing with your hands. Whatever that thing is - it's okay for the knees, apparently, since my knee doesn't really complain on that machine. So, two workouts on that machine. (Not in one day.)

 

Now, what you can't see here are the classes I took at the gym this past week. One class has you throwing weights around. Shamefully, I could only deal with, like, zero weight to begin with. I mean, I did at least have the weight-less bar to push around like some sort of loony-bin escapee ("Why, yes, there are weights on this bar, don't you see them?....No, I haven't heard from Commander Zog today, but I'm sure the Martian invasion is still on.") Luckily, after a couple sessions of this class, my body started to catch on to the fact that, yes, we do even lift, bro! and so I added some weights to the bar. Hardly much of anything, but more than zero. I should've taken a picture: those tiny, bitty 2-kg weights on the bar looked super dumb! Mice could lift more. Dwarf mice. Dwarf mice with a debilitating muscle disease! Thankfully, God In His Infinite Mercy allowed my body to graduate to 5-kg weights. They look bigger on the bar, and yes, they're heavier. Most importantly those bigger weights make me look like less of a blubbery wimp.

The other class I took was some type of Core / Cross-Fit class. It's where you slave away to lift various parts of your body into various contorted positions for miserably long amounts of time, while the teacher cheerfully bellows at you to keep your "Elbows In!" or "Just TEN MORE!" or some other tyrannical nonsense, that all just means she is secretly trying to kill you through floor exercises. I think I'll try this class again. I didn't actually die, although I wanted to; and it does seem like a good way to maybe someday eventually get into halfway better shape than I'm currently in. Most importantly I suspect the teacher's verbal abuse is similar to the kind that gets dished out at the Spartan race. Might as well get used to that now.

Now, here is a picture of me, today, not at the gym. I just finished 1 mile:

Much to my continued chagrin, I was not, in fact, able to run even part of that mile. I could not even muster up a ridiculously slow jog. No, that was not possible today. Was it the knee? you may ask sympathetically. Yes, it was the knee, a little bit. More than that, there was some kind of leg/hip pain that didn't want to go away. I'm sure it was a hip flexor complaining about over-use, since it was so badly abused in that evil Core training class yesterday...but since that particular leg is the one attached to the wonky knee, I figured it best not to push it. I did keep trying, hopefully, to trot around just a bit; alas, every single attempt was met with a sharp shooting pain and a tiny little hip flexor sigh of exasperation. So I walked. Then about a third of the way into my walking mile, the knee did start to feel slightly uncomfortable. Which meant it would be good simply to finish a one-mile walk without destroying any currently functioning joint or muscle in my body. So, no jogging for me today. A couple of barking dogs, yes, but no jogging.

And finally, we have this:

 

 Dearest darling hubby, the light of my life, my best friend and soul mate, has recently brought it to my attention that I may not be as young as I used to be, once, a long time ago; and in fact, it might be a good idea to take anti-inflammatories after a workout. 

Oh, the humiliation. Not only am I fat and out of shape, I'm taking Motrin just to keep moving.

But it's all good, in the end. So what if I have to take NSAIDS after a workout? At this stage, it's good that my butt isn't velcroed in to the sofa. If it takes some Motrin after a workout to deal with the pain, at least I'm working out. And I don't think I'll do this every time. Mostly, just after an intense workout, or after working out some part of my body I never knew existed until then.

Just 336 Days until the race!