Meditation on Exercise

Working on my stepper gives me time to think. Really stepping is golified hamster wheel, except your house is your cage.  I watch a lot of anime.  The television helps distract me. It keep me from realizing how boring it is running on the hamster wheel.   However every now and then a thought comes to me.  The same thing happens to me during swimming.  The mind turns in on itself and start to put random thoughts together in new and interesting patterns.

All exercise can be broken into three part: Future, Present, and Past

The Future

The first third of your workout,  whether or not the time is ten minutes or an hour.  Anything you do is just burning the random energy in your body at that moment. It's like adding a few minutes on to your life at some point 20 years into the future if you get there.  Is just enough exercise to justify that jelly doughnut, or three Girl Scout cookies with your morning coffee.  It the lie we tell ourselves that we are doing something good.  Cut through the boredom... Keep going...

The Present

The middle third is when you are truly doing something for yourself. The time spent here goes into heart, muscle, and lung.  The making of the future you that can really enjoy those extra minites you may have given yourself in the first third when you decide to exercise.  This the time you lose yourself and in a trance you continue on...

The Past

The last third is where the really work can begin.  This is the time where you work on the deep past, not last night, or a week ago.  It the time five years ago  that your body remembers the  three extra hot dog you wolfed down at that 4th of July cookout. or that time you had the pound of potatoe oles' and six tacos by yourself because you were "celebrating".  This last bit is always the hardest, because your bored, tired and maybe hurting.  Think of it as feeling the pain you inflected on your body during drinking that shamrock shake, that you really didn't need.

 After every session of stepping there has never been a time when I have felt worse for exercising.  I have always felt better.

I'm such a fine peice of ass below the waist!

If am using a piece of exercise equipment and it breaks, does that mean I'm exercing enough to wear it out?

I mentioned for the past year I've been using a stepper to help control my diabetes.  It's working.  The exercise is doing wonders for my legs.  However, last fall I broke a cable in the machine, and couldn't use it for a couple of weeks.

My stepper is secondhand from a local sporting goods store. I've had it for over three or four years, but haven't really used it seriously until the last year.  The stepper has to be at least 10 years old and has seen better days.  You can't even find new steppers.  They have fallen out of fashion.  So I knew the day was coming.  Something would break and I would have to fix it or find something else to do for exercise.  Tonight the other cable broke.

It's always something.  I already have to talk myself into exercising each day.  I don't need any more obstacles or excuses to keep me back.  I was doing TKD at the university  until they changed the rules.  The new regulations added a degree of difficulty and extra expenses which made the MWF routine untenable.  Then it was swimming at the local rec center. Swimming was great but changes in my class schedule made it more difficult to stick with a routine.   Although, I do miss the ladies in the whirlpool afterwards.  (I'm quite the stud with the AARP group in the morning.)   So having a cable break in stepper is just one more thing.  F*CK!

Thank God for Sportsmith.  After searching for replacement parts online I found Sportsmith.  I should have order a second cable in the fall after the first break, but I was too cheap.  However, after paying ten dollars in shipping I should have added a second spare cable to my order.  This time I ordered three cables.   By God, I'm gonna ride this machine until it fall into dust!