We found a gym we can get to on the bus, and in a moment of daring, got memberships.
The guy helping us was from Miami. He was fit and slim and gorgeous like he’s always been 190lbs. Says he was 240, 2 years ago.
(This commentary paused while Ted and I have an argument about how much the dude weighed. THE POINT IS HE LOST FIFTY POUNDS AND DOESN’T LOOK LIKE HE WAS EVER OVERWEIGHT.)
Anyway, the paperwork we filled out had a number of questions that Ted and I perhaps didn’t take quite seriously enough:
Gym form: what’s your current fitness level
Me (I actually wrote this): PPPFFFLLLBBBBTTT
Gym guy: lol, Irish trainers are gonna be like WTF?
Gym form: what have you been doing lately
Ted: eating my weight in Cheetos
Gym guy: not since moving here!
Ted: no, we found them here at–
Gym guy: DON’T TELL ME
A passionate discussion of love for ham-and-cheeto sandwiches ensued. :)
Anyway, the membership comes with a 1/w meeting with a PT for 6 weeks, and then bimonthly follow-ups, which is pretty cool. They also have (get this) a monthly social club and a bunch of other kinds of, like, actively community-building stuff, and warned us flat-out that if we start missing time at the gym they’ll call us up and be like “so, uh, what’s the deal, everything okay?”, which is awesome if true.
“You gonna start today?” asked our new Miami friend, who ended up in Ireland because he met a red-headed, blue-eyed Irish girl in Miami and followed her back to Ireland. They’ve been married 7 years and he’s lived here for 8. Also his sister moved to Anchorage a while ago and got married in Girdwood last summer and so he spent a week there and said he kept going on REALLY LONG runs without noticing it because he was gazing at the scenery and he’d be like “crap i’ve gone 10k already i better turn around” and he’s from a swamp but he never met mosquitoes like those ones before, jeez! :)
“No,” we said, “our son’s birthday party is tomorrow and then the buses don’t run so we’ll be on on the 2nd.”
“Great!” he said. “You can get it all out of your systems, eat cake and cheetohs, then come in and start new! Oooh. Except that’s right before Cinco de Mayo! Oh no! The tequila!”
“Nooo,” Ted said. “Oooh, nooo.”
We’re gonna bring him a little bag of Cheetohs for Cinco de Mayo, tho. :)