Leveling up

I'm actually starting to enjoy going to the gym. I think it's because I finally have some sense of how to lift weights, and weight lifting can actually be pretty fun. It used to be that when I went to the gym I would ride a bike or run on the elliptical for half an hour. Frankly, that's pretty boring. Even with the TVs all over the place. My eyes aren't good enough to read the closed-captioning on Jeopardy, and not knowing the answers makes that game a lot less fun.

But then I had a session with a personal trainer and he gave me all these weight lifting exercises to do. He also gave me a table that recorded the sets, reps, and weights for each exercise. There were extra columns so I could update the weights as I built my muscles. This is key to me enjoying the gym because I can watch myself level up!

For example, I started out a few weeks ago doing 40 lbs on the leg press. And now I can do 60 lbs. That means I gained two levels! We'll just ignore the fact that in high school I could do 130 lbs on the leg press because I was dancing ballet then and had ridiculously awesome legs.

I've leveled up on almost every exercise, except for the squats and chest press. Chest press is like bench press, except with hand weights instead of a bar. So if you drop the weights, they don't pin you to the bench. It still scares me a bit. When the trainer was there to spot me, he had me start with 10 lbs in each hand. But once I started doing it by myself, I immediately dropped down to 5 lbs. I've since worked my way back up to 10 lbs, so perhaps I'll level up soon.

Squats leave me deathly afraid. I'm only using a 12 lb bar at the moment and I have no desire to try anything heavier. The one and only time I attempted to do squats in high school, the bar was too heavy and I ended up dropping it and tipping over backwards. It was really painful and I don't want to repeat the experience ever again. So I won't be leveling up until I'm absolutely sure I can handle it, which is more of a psychological thing than a strength thing.

My running has also greatly improved, though I'm not sure how to measure levels for this. I'm supposed to warm up before lifting weights with a 5 minute walk then a 5 minute jog. Then I reverse the order to cool down at the end of exercising. At first, that 5 minute jog was brutal. It was all I could do to keep breathing (thank god for treadmills; I was able to focus exclusively on breathing, rather than terrain or changing course). Thirty seconds in I was watching the clock, wondering if I could make it all the way through.

It's a lot easier now. I don't start to lose my breath until the end of the jog. And when I say "lose my breath" I don't mean start to breathe hard; that still happens for the entirety of the jog. I mean I physically lose the ability to inflate my lungs. But now it's only the last 30 seconds that I have to focus all of my attention on the "in through the nose out through the mouth" mantra.

More importantly, the other day I actually felt like I had found a rhythm of sorts. There's this scene in A Separate Peace that my mind immediately flashed to:

After making two circuits of the walk every trace of energy was as usual completely used up, and as I drove myself on all my scattered aches found their usual way to a profound seat of pain in my side.  My lungs as usual were fed up with all this work, and from now on would only go rackingly through the motions.  My knees were boneless again, ready any minute to let my lower legs telescope up into the thighs.  My head felt as though different sections of the cranium were grinding into each other.

Then, for no reason at all, I felt magnificent.  It was as though my body until that instant had simply been lazy, as though the aches and exhaustion were all imagined, created from nothing in order to keep me from truly exerting myself.  Now my body seemed at last to say, "Well, if you must have it, here!" and an accession of strength came flooding through me.  Buoyed up, I forgot my usual feeling of routine self-pity when working out, I lost myself, oppressed mind along with aching body; all entanglements were shed, I broke into the clear.

I'm still not really a runner. You'd definitely want me around if you ever got attacked by a bear (though I certainly wouldn't want to be there). But for a glorious moment I got to experience this. I just wish I had a way to quantify my running progress so I could actually see my improvements.