Gymnasium Work

After being delayed over an hour at the Chevy place as I dropped off my truck for its 30K checkup (car rental operation was sort of a fiasco), I headed off to the gym in the long bed white pickup that I'm sporting for the rest of the day. By being a patient consumer, I got the rental for half off, so it's okay in the end...

Gym workout started with 35 minutes on the cycle, spinning along while watching the text scroll go across the screens in front of me. The text typist for MSNBC made some hilarious choices as they tried to capture the interviews and news readers. The text person for CNBC was substantially better, and those words seemed to match what was happening on screen. The bike was a good warmup. A cool feature of the Precor equipment is that if you wear your Polar HR chest strap, the machine will pick up and display your HR. Pretty neat. Of course, I got tickled later as I noticed that one of the treadmills was displaying my HR while I was on a nearby leg exercise machine, some 5 feet away.

I exchanged some fitball crunches and oblique crunches for the machine formerly used for such exercise, and I liked the results of that change. Those straight leg lifts in the Roman Chair deal are getting pretty solid, by the way. It's not until the very last 2 or 3 during the second set of them that my form gets a little shaky. Did the full leg routine, as well. I cranked up the pounds again on bench press, and finally have reached a point that I need to stay for a while on that one. Still, it's nice to be able to avoid using the little 2.5 pounders on either side of the bar. 75 pounds is getting respectable for bench press, I guess. I've also built up to weights on the pulldowns and seated rows that are about all I can handle right now. I like the feeling of working my muscles in this way, and I can already see a little change in my muscle tone. Also, things like the post-run pushups are getting easier, which is very cool. I am committed to the process, so I look forward to a month or two down the road to see how this has helped my running.

A good gym day. Tomorrow is a fartlek run over the Capitol 10,000 course. I wonder if that's what Gilbert will have all of the groups do?