lifetimefitness
You are viewing stuff tagged with lifetimefitness.
You are viewing stuff tagged with lifetimefitness.
Been trying a new workout technique lately, which can be described with the following words: go faster, waste less time. I’ve decreased my time by 30%, which amounts to 2 hours 18 minutes time savings per week. This has been in collaboration with Mykala, who had the original idea long ago. The thing that I had a hard time with is the mental state you have to be in to push yourself constantly for an entire workout. Since I’m lifting weights, I’m constantly resting but now trying to shorten that rest time. It isn’t a treadmill, where your pace is essentially enforced. Rather, it is like running intervals for your entire workout. Every workout. I’m getting used to it, the time-savings are tremendous, and I think I get a better workout.
Last night I was putting in a little time at Lifetime Fitness lifting weights. The pace was laid back, generally slower than I usually go. Despite the relaxed environment, there was still one man at the gym out to ruin it for the rest of us. I will call two separate transgressions committed by this man to your attention:
There are frequently crickets in the basement of my parent’s home, which nobody likes to kill. So, after accidentally amputating the legs off one too many crickets in attempts to remove them from the premises, my mother devised a system whereby a check box (remember checks?) is used to scoop up the crickets. Recently, my dad was trying to save a cricket, so he asked after the whereabouts of this box. He found it. It’s labeled in permanent marker: “Box for catching/releasing crickets.”
Well, tonight I run what is becoming an annual tradition: the Torchlight 5K in Minneapolis. It was rather funny actually, because this year I received a big email advertising the Torchlight, complete with fancy graphics and everything. Now, normally I don’t give a second look to these things (I was planning on running, anyway!), but for some reason I let this email load. Lo and behold, there was a picture of me from last year, at the starting line of the run!
Torchlight 2007 Registration - Go! Register for the Torchlight Run! Go go go!
At the starting line to the Life Time Fitness Torchlight 5k yesterday, I looked down at my race number and noticed a coupon at the end of the race for a free Michelob Ultra low calorie look at how we can appeal to the exercising crowd and isn’t it amazing how little flavor there is in this beer. Recalling how I had felt at the end of the race last year (not too hot), I turned to the guy next to me and asked, “How could anyone want beer after a run?” I guess I assumed that those standing at the front of a crowd of 2500 runners would not be the type to pound back beer after a run. Instead, he said absolutely nothing and stared through my head as if it wasn’t there. To Mr. In The Race Zone, I say: thanks for making the beginning of my race memorable. “Screw talking to people,” I thought, feeling the tension in everyone around me rise as the starting horn was lifted into the air.
The closest I ever came to dying was over two years ago. Like many teenage near-death experiences, this one was entirely unexpected and so quickly recovered from that it barely registered as a blip on my adolescent radar screen. And yet, looking back now, I can frame the event in my mind: an inch or two one way, a half second more slowly or quickly, and I would exist either in a vegetative state or as a memory of existence, whose tenure on earth would be marked in cold marble on a sunny hill near a church in Woodbury.
I hustled over to the quad leg extension machine at Lifetime Fitness, trying to wrap (rap?) up my workout as quickly as possible. That’s when I looked in the mirror in front of me, and spotted Snoop Dogg walking on a treadmill just behind me. He wasn’t sweating. He wasn’t really dressed for working out. But I mean, if it really were Snoop Dogg, I am confident that he would be way too cool to do something like run. That’s not his style. He’s going to stroll … and look cool doing it.
I saw Snoop Dogg at Lifetime Fitness, my local gym. More on this tomorrow.