Am I having fun yet?

Trying to take off the weight I gained on my last diet.

This one goes to eleven!

Three months ago when I started at Horizon's Gym I could barely do situps on a flat surface.

Each week, we'd move it up a bit or add some weight.

At my last session, the crunch board had been moved up for someone who was doing some serious work. I asked to leave it there. Why? 'cos it was set to "11," of course.

It hurt, but I managed.

Okay, doing situps at a steep angle isn't a skill one needs to use frequently, but it's still impressive.

Going out in a blaze of glory

Saturday morning, September 22.

10 am.

I get on the treadmill and suddenly it all comes together for me. I just start running and don't stop.

2.04 miles in 20 minutes. That's 6.12 mph.

I made it to the Gold board!

I can has cardio, indeed!

Ruby Sneakers

It's got to be the new Mizuno Wave Riders. After 2 weeks of painful running with no gains in speed or distance, I flew past the old record.

Cardio Thursday

I totally blew away the 1.69 from the other day.

Problem is, I get more and more tired out after each session. When the hell do I start feeling better, feeling all that energy that they keep telling me that I'm supposed to having?

Cardio Saturday

This was from Saturday morning. Somehow, I always feel "lighter" on the weekend, and now that I'm on vacation, everything seems a little bit easier. Saturday marks the end of three straight weeks in the "Body for Life" program. Normally they want you to go for 12 weeks, but I've only got the 8 weeks of July and August. I'm seriously considering, though, continuing this for another four, through the end of September.

Not sure how much faster I can go on that stupid treadmill, though.

20 minutes of cardio is only how far?

Three times a week I ask myself this question:

"What? I've been running my butt off for the last twenty minutes, and I've only gone a mile and a half?"

Ok, not record breaking, but pretty good for a beginner.

I've been doing this diet and resistance training for the last two weeks, and ever other day is a cardio workout. 20 minutes of running on a treadmill, first slow, then more quickly, then fast, then a slowdown, and the cycle repeats.

It's kind of like being at work.

A few months ago I had to do a "stress test" at the hospital, and I could barely run for ten minutes. Of course, I was carrying around 20 extra pounds, and the stress test was designed to work the hell out of you. As it happened, I was pegged at "normal" on that test. I think I'd do better now.

Anyway, I've got six weeks to go. Don't even ask me about the weight and resistance part. The program is designed to push you until your muscles give out. I do this right after work every day, and usually I consider myself lucky if I can drive home.

Stressed!

They told me that I needed a stress test.

Funny. I mean, did they think that I didn't know how to get stressed properly on my own?

No, as it turns out, my blood pressure and cholesterol - genetically dispositioned to be high - had passed the point where we'd kept saying "We'll keep an eye on it for now." Since I'm also rapidly approaching the half-century mark, it was time to get a whole bunch of things checked out.

Stupid aging.

Anyway, I ended up spending the morning of Friday the 13th being tested, prodded, poked, and sent from room to room and back again as they checked out various things on my body. Admittedly, most of my time was spent in waiting. Waiting to check in. Waiting to get the IV setup. Waiting for the radioactive isotopes to be pumped around my body.

I brought something to read, though, so I was cool.


Okay, this is the beginning of my stress test.

Needles, IVs, and some people who are a little too cheerful this early in the morning. They just injected me with "nuclear" stuff, and I'm in the waiting area. My spider senses are not tingling!

At some point, though, I was sitting in the waiting area near the end of the day and reflecting on what had transpired. A couple of months ago I started taking medicine to reduce my high blood pressure, and it was tested to be well within the normal range. My cholesterol numbers were trending downward. They put me on a machine which traced the isotopes through my bloodstream so that they could see where blockages might be. I was wired to a machine that measured the electrical activity of my heart while I was running on a treadmill. And I walked around all day with a small device in my arm that made it easier for the various technicians to get various fluids in and out of me.

Think about how much of this technology was available when I was born.

Almost none of it.

And while I was waiting, I read a book with my Palm Tungsten, a book that was stored on a small card that I downloaded from a website that had thousands of free books. When I was tired of reading, I sent an email to a friend in Australia, sent an SMS (text) message to my sister in Brazil, and checked the Yahoo and Google websites for news. Oh, and I took a picture of a tube in my arm and sent it to my blog.

How totally cool is that?

Seriously, until a few weeks ago I'd had very little contact with doctors, and even less with the inside of hospitals. The hospital that I used for the stress test was not even one of those state-of-the-art facilities, and yet it still had a better range of equipment than any place in existence 48 years ago.

Technology. It's awesome!