Exercise Is Lame

There's been a lot of talk around work and among friends about self improvement. Erik has been particularly expressive of his plans in a series of posts on 43 Things. I think I've fallen into a bad crowd and feel myself succumbing to some implicit peer pressure.

As I was wasting away Thanksgiving day with nothing to do until Erik's party later that evening, I decided to take advantage of the relative emptiness of the building to spend some time doing some simple exercises while no one was around to mock my wimpy attempts. My first session reminded me of a scene out of Beavis and Butt-head when the coach orders the boys into the gym to build up some muscle. Their time there is a disaster. Butt-head lies down on the bench and tries to press the bare barbell with no additional weight on it but can't even manage that. The bar falls on his neck and starts to choke him. As Butt-head starts to turn blue, Beavis rushes over to help but even the combined strength of the two of them is not enough to lift the bar. I did a little better, but still I was lifting the barbell with no weights, struggling to maintain balance.

The party that evening lasted well into night and toward the end I felt my arms getting really quite sore. I did my best to stay curled up in the corner of the sofa because I nearly lacked the strength to prop myself up. My muscles stayed sore throughout the rest of the weekend. It wasn't until early the next week that I noticed the absence of the constant pain I had been living with for the past several days.

The worst part of exercising is that the effects are only temporary. The same weights and repetitions no longer tire my muscles like they used to. And so I am going to have to increase the weights to compensate for new strength. I find that I am now walking faster and I can usually get to the office in the morning in less time when I walk than when I waited for the bus. And this is starting to disturb my sleeping habbits as well. I'm staying up longer and have more energy throughout the day. I'm feeling less of an urge to just sit passively in front of the television .What am I supposed to do with all the extra time? I don't like it at all.