Addicted to Exercise

This was certainly a wacky sort of morning due to a conspiracy of a number of factors:

1) I was not doing the long run with everyone else because I am still letting my leg rest

2) The long run for today started and ended at Gilbert’s house instead of RunTex

3) It turns out the gym doesn’t open until 8:00 on Saturdays

4) Gilbert needed someone to go pick up all the post-run tacos

So, I ended up doing things pretty much backwards this morning. I drove up to the north side of town to pick up the breakfast tacos, timing the trip so that I would arrive at Gilbert’s house with them right as everyone was finishing their runs. On my way back down there, I came down Manchaca and got to see all the runners that were finishing. They were pretty well spread out by then, having run 16 miles. I yelled encouragement at them and honked as I passed. It was almost like being at a race.

So that was fun. Then began the backwards section. I ate tacos, stretched, and then headed off to the gym to do my workout.

Since I’ve been spending so much time in the gym, I finally caved in and bought an MP3 player. As Richard pointed out, I had been living under a rock since I did not know how small these things had become lately. I swear, the thing is the size of my finger and weighs nothing. That’s pretty nice since that means I could even have it when I run if I happened to be so inclined and it wouldn’t slow me down at all.

The elliptical trainer is a great workout, but I had been limited on it because I just got so bored while not going anywhere. Being able to blast a bunch of music I like into my ears really helped with that. I was on that thing for more than two hours this morning, and my hands were off the rails for most of that. The only time I had to hold on was for a couple minutes when the incline got really high about 45 minutes into it. (I decided to leave the incline on a reasonable settting for the whole second hour.)

So that went really well. Even once I am running all the time again I can certainly handle doing that once a week from here on out. I felt really good today. I probably could have run, but the PT told me the other day to hold off some more. Obviously I am staying in great shape. Unfortunately, I was not the fastest person on the elliptical trainer today. There was some dude on the one next to me, and I saw he was doing over 220 strides/min for an hour. I wasn’t going that fast today — somewhere around 205 I think. That’s what it showed when I removed the towel from the display at the end. Either way, it was nice that I wasn’t the only one there with a big puddle of sweat under the machine for once.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 2nd, 2005 at 4:43 pm and is filed under Elliptical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.