I went back to the half rack today after many days of avoidance. The half rack is the elliptical thingy with handlebars and you only move your feet. I can stay on this thing if I close my eyes and concentrate on the music playing in my ears. If I open my eyes I lose the rhythm of the thing and am in serious danger of falling off. This is really pathetic, as in reality all I am doing is shuffling my feet in place. I think I’ll give this a try for a few days. Maybe I’ll develop some sense of rhythm and be able to move on to the ¾ rack. Unfortunately I don’t see any future for me and the full rack- the elliptical where all four limbs go in different directions at the same time. After all these years I don’t see me acquiring the coordination necessary to operate the rack. I’m a firm believer they should come with a warning label – DO NOT ATTEMPT IF YOU CAN NOT DANCE! At least you would know in advance what you were getting into.
Yesterday Daughter #1 and I took Husband/Father with us to the pit. It was bring a friend for free day, and it was raining, so H/F couldn’t do his usual four mile run in the park, so he decided to give the pit a try. We created a monster.
I’m sorry to say it, but we have. He’s not quite Mary Shelley’s monster, but close enough. Daughter #1 and I usually restrict our workout to around forty minutes a day. As we have been going every day, this seems adequate, especially for me who has avoided exercise as ruthlessly as I’ve avoided poison ivy for my entire life. For example: I never played any kind of organized sport as a child. Some of this can be attributed to Rule #5 of the Code of Southern Women – Women do not participate in sporting activities other than tennis, and then only if they can do it without getting dewey. As I have about as much hand to eye coordination as I have rhythm, tennis was out, and thereby all possible organized sporting activities.
The key word there is ‘organized’. If I was careful not to get caught I could play football with my older brother and his friends, but only if our mother wasn’t any where around to see. Said brother taught me all I needed to know about football, baseball and golf. He tried to teach me about basketball, but the whole foul situation was too confusing and I gave up on it. I can dribble a basketball, but running down court with it at the same time is out of the question. I was once pretty good at free throws too and I’m excellent at miniature golf thanks to above mentioned brother’s high school job at a local course. Now that several decades have passed and the place is long gone I think it is all right to tell you he let me play for free on weeknights when the place was empty.
Back to H/F at the pit. Daughter #1 and I did our forty minutes and were sufficiently dewey as the relative humidity in the pit was somewhere near 100%, so we found H/F who had kicked my assets on the stairs, outran Daughter #1 on the treadmill and was pedaling his way up Pike’s Peak on a lounge chair bike. Since the thing was people powered we couldn’t pull the plug, but instead wondered how we were going to get him off the thing and out the door. We stood on either side of him trying our best to remain upright. Having dehydrated long ago despite downing enough water to float a small armada, standing around waiting for him to poop out wasn’t appealing.
Finally, declaring us wimps and himself the winner, though we weren’t informed of the competition, he grudgingly coasted down the mountain and allowed us to leave. I was all the way to the locker room before I remembered I had the car key and we could have left him there to find his own way home. Oh well, live and learn.
Yesterday I climbed ninety floors and pedaled almost far enough to get me home, had I had wheels. Today I hung onto the half rack for twenty minutes, climbed sixty floors and biked half way home. Not a bad day.
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