Today at the Gym

Today at the gym I started with 10 minutes at level 15 at full ramp height (20) on the elliptical machine. I was listening to the Above and Beyond Trance Around the World podcast, and it was an especially good week. Well, maybe not as good as the weeks they spent in Singapore (or am I confusing Singapore with Thailand? It may have been Thailand) which had lots of great female vocals mixed it, but the energy in this particular week's episode, which was based on sets done in Eastern Europe (Poland?) was really high. I wonder if that's that pattern, Eastern Europe = high energy, deep base mostly non-vocal tracks, which Asia = female vocals and a more trippy trance-like sound.

Anyway, after I finished forward and and reverse patterns on the machine, I switched over to the treadmill for 15 minutes of walking and sprinting. I had the incline set to around 11 (not sure if this corresponds to degrees or percentage) and the walking speed at 3.4 mph, and for the three 15 second sprints I upped the speed to 8.5 to 9 mph. It probably takes between 10 and 15 seconds to get from 3.4 to 8.5, not just because the belt has to speed up, but because you can't just push the increase speed button and have it go up to 8.5. One press and hold of the button will cause the speed to only increase by a maximum of 1.5 mph or so, probably as a safety mechanism, but this is really annoying when you are trying to push the button until it finally gets up to a challenging sprint level AND run at the same time!

Anyway, this is pretty much the most boring post EVER! How can I spice this up a bit? If I mentioned that after my run I did a couple minutes of jump roping, would that save it? No, probably not...

Fuck it, it's too late and this is my blog after all, so I'm just going to keep going.

When I got in the elevator up to the apartment, an attractive girl got on at the same time with her dog, which she directed to "please sit", and because my father recently got a new dog that we've been working on giving positive training feedback to, I immediately responded "good dog!" when it followed her directions. I think she took this as some sort of flirtation because she started telling me how beautiful of a day outside it was... and in my post-sprinting/jump-roping state all I could muster in response was "Is that right?". Then we enjoyed several long seconds of silence punctuated only by my continued heavy breathing. She quickly got off on the floor beneath mine, probably thankful that I didn't follow her off...

So the awesome part about doing sprints is they stimulate your metabolism (something to do with mimicking flight-or-fight modes) so that your heart rate stays up long after you finish your workout, you continue to burn fat and they supposedly stimulate more muscle growth. The not-so-awesome part is that you run hot for long after too, which means, at least for me, you sweat, which sucks if you have to get ready for work right away. So to minimize the chance of showing up for work in wet clothes, I literally take cold showers to cool down. It's either that, or I have to sit around cooling off for about an hour before I get dressed, which I simply don't have time for most days. So, it's cold showers in the morning for me, which I'm guessing that everyone will agree just sucks, the cold part that is, not the showers. And the worst part is that even though I take a cold shower, about five minutes after I get out, I still tend to start running hot again, and that was true this morning.

So I got on the bus still sweating and plopped down to listen to the latest podcast of This American Life, a radio show on NPR that is generally pretty funny (I like it enough that I sent them money). But the last two episodes or so have been kinda depressing. The end of last week's was a story about a man falling in love and how it ended, and the first part of this week's was about a man in Afghanistan who fell in love with a woman that he couldn't afford to marry, who then got money from some Western Aid workers, but it turned out the families dissaproved so he ended up using the money for an arranged marriage. WTF? I wanted to hear funny or at the very least thoughtful stories, not ones that would have me arriving at work bummed out! On the other hand, the people on the bus proably prefer the later, as that means they don't have to wonder if the big sweaty red haired guy laughing in the seat next to them is going to do something... well, odd I suppose.