I'm happy to note that my discipline towards exercise, measured in visits to the gym we joined, is holding up pretty good overall. I went last night when I
really didn't feel like it, had a solid workout, and left feeling satisfied about it.
It being the first workout after a few days' rest/neglect, I always have a little more drive than back-to-back workout days. The off days couldn't be helped. It's been an alternately busy and tiring week, requiring a lenient approach to formal workout days.
I am even more proud of my wife, who has historically taken a, shall-we-say
lackadaisical approach to fitness. She noted that although her weight was on the fast track to
Slimville, she wasn't feeling as strong and healthy as she wanted. She took it upon herself to do something about it, and then stuck with it. Not necessarily a holiday miracle, but given my own disjointed handling of problems vs. solutions, watching someone close to me take responsibility and control over a circumstance and see it through is really something noteworthy.
So there; I noted it...
But back to the important topic at hand: me.
As much as I'd like the abs of Adonis and pectorals of, well, anybody with better pecs than me, I think my overall goals are going to have to shift. I've never thought much of conditioning my lower body, largely because my body-image and idea of strength always assumed an upper-body stacked with beef, letting the lower half look after itself. Considering my medium- and long-term goals, though, I am rethinking this. Those goals:
- I'd like to get out and hike/camp/fish next year. A lot.
- I'd like to look not so much like the Michelin Man's pregnant mistress.
- I'd like to have buttcheeks that didn't flap in a stiff breeze like two hairy windsocks.
- I'd like to have both knees not hurt and threaten to give out so often; one of them is clearly defective from the factory, and I've just got to make do with what I have.
You add all that up, and it all points to legs. Aerobic workouts to lose weight, strength training to develop strength, muscle tone, bone density and joint health. By spring, I would dearly love to have legs like a mountain goat (hey, hooves and all, I don't care). I'd like to have
gams like a mountain troll marathoner. I'd like to have strength, agility and endurance. I'd like to have an ass that my wife can slap without spreading ripples through my
backfat up into my forehead.
It's tough, because I've always felt I wasn't built for speed. Or motion in general, for that matter. I've always felt deep in my brittle, flaky bones that running was a torture visited upon man by a cruel, pitiless creator, and that I should have as little part in it as humanly possible, to avenge the moral wrongness of it, if nothing else. Now it looks as though I'll be spending lots of time on treadmills, lunging, squatting (hideous in name and deed, if you ask me).
Yechh.
Deep down (maybe not all that deep) inside me there is a pessimist, who has seen many efforts bear puny fruit. He truly doubts in his pathetic, cynical heart that all the effort in the world will bring me closer to the above goals. That little bastard needs a kick in the nuts, and it would do me a world of good.
But, I am encouraged by my wife. She took it upon herself to declare a goal and work fastidiously towards it. If she can do it, maybe I can, too. Ain't she great?
