Shower.

I’ve had a two week involuntary exercise break, but today I was back at the Average Joe’s Gym. Of course it’s not really called Average Joe’s Gym, but based on the people who go there it might as well have been. All ages, all shapes and people on both ends of the fitness scale. Since my last visit they have finished the locker room renovation work, opened new locker rooms on the third floor and closed the old ones in the basement.

The new locker rooms are spacey and look fresh and new. At least that goes for the men’s locker room, I have not looked inside the women’s, but I assume they look the same. The most interesting new feature is the showers. They are not like ordinary showers with levers, they are controlled by motion sensors. Quite fascinating, but with a few design flaws.

You’re not supped to touch the sensors turning on and off the shower and controlling the water temperature, but if you accidentally do - like I did once - you run the risk that the sensor will continue to register movement because you have covered it with water. So, if you turn up the water temperature, it might just go up until you get burned. It generally looked like the senors where kind of sensitive to water. A bit weird to use them in a shower, but what do I know.

Warp Speed.

It’s been a slow weekend. Gine worked Saturday and most of my time was devoted to, surprise, surprise, EVE Online. I’m still bouncing around solo in high security space, but have moved down to .7 where I have to deal with the odd rat. Right now I have two Hammerhead drones doing the dirty work for me and I’m considering moving to .6 space because surviving in .7 isn’t much of a challenge. It is of course possible that .6 is too dangerous for a scared care bear like myself.

I also went out and bought a Retriever. There will be another few days before I can actually fly it, but I found one at a reasonable price only a few jumps away, so I decided to buckle up in the Badger Mark II and fly over to transport it back home.

Yes, all that was just gibberish to all of you except one of my regular readers (yes, I take the liberty to actually think I do have regular readers), so let’s talk about the complete opposite of sitting in front of a computer playing a game. Continue reading "Warp Speed."

Pain.

Today I had my first run this year and not surprisingly there were a lot of people at the gym. The first couple of weeks are probably the best weeks for gyms all over the world as people with good intentions and fresh New Year’s resolutions get their memberships. Many of them will go to the gym for a month or two, then they’ll be all out of motivation but still pay for a full year. It’s a great business model.

After only two kilometer on the treadmill I started to feel a pain on the back of my ankles, it quickly got worse and so bad I could not continue running. After a short walking break I continued but had to stop again after a minute or so. I have no idea why it happened, I had drunk enough water before the work out and felt quite fresh when I started. A probably cause can be my legs are starting to adjust to the new shoes. It also looked like the treadmill was not perfectly level, so it could be that my feet had been trying to compensate for the entire run and finally just decided that it was impossible and gave up.

Now I’m taking a day off from running and will give it another go on Friday, hopefully with a better result. On Friday it will probably be less crowded as well.

Shoemaker.

Yesterday I had my third treadmill run at the gym and with three runs in the first five days since I became a member, I think I’m getting a reasonable amount of value for the money. If you want to go to the gym but don’t want to go there when it’s crowded, it looks like Friday evening is a good time to do it. I only counted two other people in the same room as me, and it can take at least 30 people.

I’ve made a couple of interesting observations when comparing running outside to running on a treadmill. It’s much easier to control the speed and hence also the my heart rate because I can control the speed of the ground. This means that I run a bit slower, but for a much longer time. When running outside, I was sprinting around for about 12 minutes before I had to stop, now I’m pushing it towards 30 minutes and hope to manage an hour while still keeping my heart rate at an acceptable level before the end of February next year. Continue reading "Shoemaker."

Members Only.

Yesterday I did something I really didn’t think I would ever do: I sold my soul to a fitness center. It’s getting colder outside, with patches of slippery ice everywhere. It makes running outside somewhat hazardous and to be on the semi-safe side one should run with a helmet. Not only will it look stupid, but it would probably be very unpleasant as well.

So, by getting a membership at a fitness center I get to run inside on a treadmill. It’s not cold, not slippery, but ridiculously expensive and I had to sign up on a twelve month plan. That can be a good thing since it means I have to use my membership for something even when it gets warmer again and I’m starting to run outside. In their defense, they did have a plan where you could pay for a single month at a time, but they had priced it so high it just didn’t make any sense.