Crunch Time
March 8th, 2008 Posted in Preparation—————————————————————
One hundred and forty eight! One hundred and forty nine!
(Gasp, gasp)
One hundred and fifty!!
This is last night. I am lying on my back on the floor, panting.
Erin is sitting on the Lazy Boy beside me with her eyebrows raised; she’s obviously impressed. Luke is laying down on his belly next to me, trying his best to make me stay still so that he can chew on my ear, which to him always seems tastier than a six-pack of Arrowroots. I woud like to say that he’s impressed, but he - for now - seems more impressed that he can chew hard enough to make me jump.
I have just finished one hundred and fifty crunches, and it only took me about five minutes to rip through the ab-burning repetitions. I have impressed myself.
Three weeks ago I would have laughed off the notion of twenty five crunches. One hundred and fifty was something that you read about in Men’s Health, scrunched your head thoughtfully, and then dismissed as marketing fodder.
Three weeks ago is when I came to the decision that I was going to need a new body if I was going to pull off this trek, and there was nothing serious in my way except my own apathy. The biggest problem was that I was quite comfortable with apathy — we had always been great workout partners. This time I had to do something different. I couldn’t really change dramatically by just “eating right” (for we all know that never amounts to anything), and my new habit of walking almost everywhere could only do so much (to work in the mornings, home at lunch, back up to work after lunch, home again in the evening, and even then back up to Javaroma - our local fine coffee haunt - in the evenings to catch up on my photography business and write dribble for my Everest blog).
I bought a gym membership.
The last time I had a gym “membership” (which came free with ungodly tuition), I was in college and had a reason to have a gym membership. The “frosh fifteen” was no myth, and as we all consumed Kraft Dinner out of hot pots on a thrice-nightly schedule, we quickly found that those relatively trim bodies we left high school with were very quickly replaced with beer and convenience food-thickened bloatededness. Due to the fact that college was the time to focus more on impressing the opposite sex than our professors, the gym became a second home.
That was twelve years ago, however (!!), and the hundreds of crunches I did at that time somehow wore off since. I needed a gym membership, and bought one. The Racquet Club here in Yellowknife, conveniently located a stone’s throw away. Damn, I can’t even blame the weather (darkness, cold, sleet, mosquitos, cook breezes, or any other number of excuses that I had in my former vocabulary), as the Racquet Club is seriously that close to my house that I could probably walk over in my skivvies and make it to the change room before anyone called the cops.
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Back to Luke lying on the floor filling up my ear lobe with clear baby drool.
I had just finished one hundred and fifty crunches, and I honestly have to say that I was elated. I seriously struggled through twenty - not three weeks ago - when I complained to Erin in a whiny voice about how it felt that my stomach was on fire. That time, she only raised one eyebrow.
It’s really amazing what the body can do in a short time. Seriously I’ve convinced myself that excuses really are the only thing that gets in most of our ways. In three short weeks I have dropped from an unpleasant 201 pounds (on my 5′ 9 1/2″ frame) to 191 pounds, and have likely gained some muscle weight in the process. I have been in the gym on average six days a week (at six o’clock on the morning!), and feel - for lack of a better description - Mr. T good. Seriously…give me some gold chains, a Mohawk, and some face paint and I could shoot a remake of the A-Team pronto. And this hasn’t been at the expense of food, which always seems to be my hold up. I love food with a passion, and it loves me. I haven’t given it up, and don’t plan to. Give me a big juicy steak on the grill and give me my McDonald’s bacon-and-egg bagels. Give me my weekend six-pack of beer and my occasional glass of red wine, like the Merlot that I’m sipping on now.
Now, three weeks by no means equates success. It’s a start, and I feel one whole heck of a mountain goat better now than I did at the start of February, but it’s just a start. My goal? To go from 201 pounds to 175 pounds for the trek, with a massive shift from my still somewhat flabby anatomy to something that doesn’t bounce when I don’t jump.
And by stating that goal here - on the record for anyone who’s bored enough to read this - I hope that it will serve as greater inspiration to me to ultimately reach my goal.
Cheers.