Blazing the Exercise Trail

I'm a homebody. A bookworm. If you give me the choice between a nature hike and going through a play-by-play pause-and-discuss watch of a good movie with my husband, call me a potato and pass the remote.

Even so, I'm down fifty pounds.

The diet factor could be its own whole post, as could changes in my sleep, but for now I want to talk about the factor I thought I'd never be excited by: exercise.

It started small. Due to a fluke, Sergey and I lived in Santa Monica very close to beachfront for about a year. Ocean Ave is a beautiful walk, and tracing the tide along the beach is even more delightful. Still, it took Sergey egregious effort to get me to come on near-daily walks with him. I always enjoyed it once I was out, but getting me out? Overcoming my inertia? Half a workout in and of itself.

It was rough. I was so out of shape that I was exhausted by an hour's easy walk. Occasionally we would sprint for an intersection when we could see the pedestrian countdown commencing from afar and I would wheeze my way there a good half-block behind Sergey, barely making it to the other side. Over time, the hour-long walk expanded a bit. I found I wheezed less over time, but my resistance to leaving the house kept up.

Before we moved to Texas, Sergey made two very important discoveries. First, we both loved playing DDR, and second, DDR is a legitimately difficult workout. Once we moved, he was determined to obtain an arcade-grade set of DDR pads. It took about a year, but eventually we came to own this very unusual exercise set. Nearly every day, for about a year, we would go through 25 songs for a set. We moved from easy to medium to hard over the course of that year. I think my favorite song to impress people with was Kick the Can on hard.

But after a while, that wasn't enough. We'd certainly upped our endurance and I was enjoying the game, but the difficulty was no longer in whether we could keep going, but whether we could move our feet fast enough in the most complicated rhythms. It was no longer pushing us in the workout department.

So we tried jogging, and that was rough. Even a beginner's jogging regimen was agony on the lungs. Still, we were making progress. As we continued, the darndest thing happened. I actually began to enjoy going out to jog. What started out as pure lung torture was not only getting easier, but if we missed a day, my body missed the exercise. It felt as if I'd cheated my body out of a little bit of something nice and my body let ME know that IT knew I was holding back on it.

Unfortunately, there are only so many months out of the year in a city like Houston that you can do outdoor exercise, so come summer we retreated to the gym (LA Fitness for us), aka the place I never thought I'd develop a taste for. It turns out that with a good audiobook and the elliptical, I can really go at it. And once my sister helped me get over some nervousness and approach the weight machines, oh-ho-ho.

For a long time now, post-workout me is permeated with all kinds of physical feel-good. Happy little endorphins run laps in my system, and I can see real progress happening. My endurance is like nothing my high-school self would believe I'm capable of, and I may even be improving my noodle-arms just a little. Now, weight control is about half the motivation, and the other half is improvement and the endorphin-heavy feeling of having pushed myself.

So, it's time to log where I am on the various machines now, because I really REALLY want to see where this goes next.

Current gym time: 60-80 minutes most days, depending.

Elliptical: Level 16/17, 40-50 minutes, 500-600 cal burn.

Weight machine for wrist-to-shoulder muscle (my weakest): 10lbs, 25 reps

Weight machine for twisting torso muscles on each side: 50lbs, 20 reps each side

Weight machine for lower-spine-muscles: 80-100 lbs, 30-50 reps depending

Crunch machine: 40-50 lbs, 30-40 reps depending

Here's to endorphin-laden improvement and feeling better in one's own skin on a slightly more regular basis.