Gyming, Part 2

I am somewhat impressed by gym people who can hop on one machine in the room-where-propelling-oneself-causes-no-forward-motion, and just go for it--for tens of minutes at a time. I think the real name for that area of the gym is cardio room, as it is a place to elevate your heart rate, but I don't know. I'm not very gymmy, I just go there. It is also the room where people can watch you huff and puff as they take their dogs for grooming or hit the local hash-slingery for breakfast.

I can force myself to fake-row for ten minutes straight, or fake-run on the fake-road-made-of-bungee-elastic for fifteen...but then, I am sorry to say, I am bored out of my skull. So, for me anyway, the object of having many kinds of machines is to compensate for my attention span.

Sometimes I wonder if people choose their treadmills on the basis of closest tv screen. Fox, appropriately, is on the far right side of the room, near the window. CNN is to the left near the water cooler. And I am usually somewhere toward the back, wondering whether I can, with athletic integrity, jump off the silly machine and go spend some time figuring out how you wrangle the weird devices toward the back of the gym which purport to zero in on your foot arch/mandible/muscle between the 3rd and 4th ribs, or whatever that one specializes in.

I have done the 5:30 am spinning class a few times. I will not do it tomorrow because I cannot maintain the "hovering" posture for as long as the commando-lady commands, and the bike seats do crazy torture to the pin bones if I slack off too much. My pins need a break. Instead I'll vary the fake-rowing, and fake-running with a real run-to-nowhere. If a conveyor belt is good enough for luggage, it's good enough for me.