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Fancy Gym: Day One
Well, my first personal trainer workout at the #fancygym this morning went really poorly.
I arrived slightly early and the PT was 15 minutes late. Furthermore, I’m pretty sure he was *only* 15 minutes late because I asked more than once about where he was. On top of that, there’s a verbal quirk in Irish English that probably comes from something in the Irish language, where people often end a sentence with “so” or “like” or “okay”. Normally I don’t mind that, but the guy who was trying to cover for the late PT ended everything not only with “okay”, but the upward inflection that made it sound like a question. He was not actually asking a question, but every time he said it I wanted to snarl that no, it was *not* okay, because I’m paying money for this service and I expect it to be delivered on time.
So I was really not predisposed to appreciate the workout by the time the guy arrived, and then it was…not a workout I expected. It wasn’t a bad one, except the back extensions…thing…it’s not a machine, it’s something you step into and do body weight with…makes my knees feel pretty awful, so I’m not gonna do that, obviously. It’s all a body weight workout except one set with weights for shoulders, and it’s fine, if not particularly inspiring. And it might have been perfectly inspiring if I wasn’t pissed off to begin with, IDK.
Then he was like “so the cardio, do you like treadmills or crossfit” and I, who had already told two people at this gym, both of whom had written it down, that I won’t use those machines, said, pretty fucking flatly at that point, “I will not run or crossfit. I will row or cycle,” and he gave me a rowing set that I may or may not do. I mean, I’ll row, but I don’t know that I’ll do the thing he wants me to, because, AS I EXPLAINED TO THEM ALREADY, I’m already (theoretically) biking there and back again, which is about all the cardio my fat ass self can handle right now.
And I don’t know if it’s because this whole thing had already made me really cranky or what, but there are a lot of Very Fit Women at that gym, sufficiently fit as to make me feel quite self-conscious, which is pretty unusual for me, so that didn’t improve my temper any.
And I walked home so I could figure out the shortcut Ted and Henry told me about, because I knew where it came out but not where it started, and I wanted to know that so I could *actually* bike. It was a pleasant enough walk, except I’d already just done a workout for the first time in A VERY LONG TIME and it took most of an hour to walk home (which is why cycling is the only really viable option for getting to this gym), so I’m pretty wrecked.
Anyway, usually working out makes me pretty cheerful, but I’m a goddamn crankypants right now.
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FancyGym
I got a membership at the fanciest gym I’ve ever been in.
I didn’t really plan to get a membership right now, because the only practical way to get to it is on my bicycle, and I’m not very fit, so the prospect of biking there and back again seemed like enough. But then it turned out it has an obscene membership fee, and because December they had a special that reduced it by 75%, so I…got the membership. I can cancel after 3 months, if it turns out cycling to it is too insurmountable.
Anyway, it’s a massive facility, with a 50 meter pool (even I don’t need a 50 meter pool. 50 meters is a long, tiring distance to swim at once!) and a 40 foot climbing wall and a huge free weights area and an equally huge machines area and all, but the surreally fancy part are the cardio studios, which have Ginormous Screens, like, 3 of them on the back wall behind stages for the teachers, so you can do virtual classes or teacher-led classes. The spin studio has like a movie-theatre-sized curved screen on its back wall, and a “tour” setting for one of the spin classes where you, like, cycle ‘through’ a landscape that changes on the screen. It’s not quite a holodeck, but it’s pretty fancy. It’s certainly a living-in-the-future sort of gym.
Other fanciness includes part of the deal being a couple of personal trainer sessions and customized workouts and all that, so this morning I went in and got assessed, which includes the rather horrifying experience of being 3d scanned SO I CAN REALLY APPRECIATE MY BLOBBITUDE and the fact that I am basically a rectangle from shoulders to hips. Also it included doing as many pushups as I could (20, from the knee), planking for as long as I could (55 seconds, which was a lot longer than I expected), and also touching my toes a few times, which I could do but by my standards was embarrassingly poorly executed.
Saturday I go back for my first workout, which has theoretically been tailored for me. I explained that the hard part of going to the gym for me is GETTING to the gym, once I’m there I’m fine, and that because I’m going to be biking there and back again that I wanted a low-key workout for the first while, because I’m gonna be dead otherwise. However, tomorrow they’ve got an open day for their chiropractor and acupuncturist and possibly somebody else, so I’m gonna go in and try to get crunched and stuff, which would help my miserably aching shoulder.
The PT did concede that the week before Christmas was not a great time to start a weight loss plan, but told me about the classes she thought I’d enjoy, and when I said it was the fanciest gym I’d ever been in, laughed and whispered, “It’s the fanciest gym I’ve ever worked in.” :) She also, heh. She also said during the assessment stuff, when I said I was 45, “You don’t look 45,” and I started to say, “Thank you,” but I stopped because, like, I don’t MIND being 45, and in fact, I do look 45: this is what 45 looks like on me, and the whole ageism thing that says Looking Younger Is Better and just, everything, you know? Yeah. So I’ve got to practice saying “haha but i do, this is what 45 looks like on me” or something, IDK.
I’d say all of this is prompted by the asthma diagnosis, but that’s not exactly true. What may be true is that having gone back in after a couple of weeks and gotten the next step up in inhalers, I’m breathing so much more easily that maybe the prospect of trying to work out seems more plausible. There’s also been an absolutely epic amount of stress going on (I would like that to stop, please: this is year three of the absolute worst of it, and year five or so of just fundamental strain), and probably hitting something or pushing heavy things around would help a little. And I did a little cycling this summer and was reminded how much I *miss* the 20+ mile bike rides I used to go on almost daily in Anchorage, so although I remain perpetually disappointed by the lack of cycling culture in Ireland, I want to try to get back into that.
If I’m awesome, I’ll report back on Saturday about the workout. I can tell you what, though, tomorrow I’m gonna be feeling those pushups and planks… o.O
