Dogs

206.2 lbs. Going down sharply again. 205 is still snickering like some crazed asshole over there in the corner. I really hate 205 with a fiery passion. I feel no enmity for 200 or even the 190's for that matter. They are old friends I have not seen for a very long time. 205 is just a bastard, plain and simple. He thinks he has tiger's blood but I keep assuring him that my foot will soon be on his throat.

On Facebook there are a lot of my friends getting healthy and working out. It's neat to watch. Sometimes they post what type of exercise they did that day or what amount of weight they have lost over a period of time and it is really encouraging. The posts I find most interesting are the ones where people do shout outs to their work out music of choice. It happens a lot more often than you realize. "I just love the new Black Eyed Peas! They made me go that extra quarter mile today!" and so on and so forth. I love seeing these posts whether I agree with the choice of music or not. Rarely will I disagree with anyone's choice of work out music, if it gets you motivated - it gets you motivated.

I know when I was in High School my workout music choices were pretty odd. I used to enjoy Billy Joel's "All for Leyna" because it was angry and sort of fast (at least in my teenage mind). I also liked The Police's "Spirits in the Material World". I felt energized as I aimlessly pumped my concrete filled plastic weight set on my Weider bench. I say aimlessly because when we learned about weight training at Derby Senior High, we didn't learn much except intimidation.

There is certainly a demotivating factor, overall, to gym workouts. As you flail away on this exercise or that weight set you are forced to view people who have spent a good part of their lives fighting athlete's foot and sucking in the aroma or locker room ball sweat to achieve a superior physique (steroids never hurt anyone right?). If I were to make an accurate assessment, through hindsight, about my early experiences in the gym room, I would have to say the demotivation factor was higher than normal in the Derby Senior High School P.E. weight training class. Without knowing it, I had enrolled myself in a class principally loaded with student athletes. It was one of those little secrets I was not privy to: Weight Training was the class that all the jocks took for P.E. credit which was why it was run by one of the coaches of the football team. This was not a class for shlubs or interlopers, this was a class for kids who already knew all about weight training.

Sure there were other shlubs like me among the Olympians and of course we looked like the cast of Revenge of the Nerds: The Early Years. As our other classmates were setting maxes and grunting more than a prison cell block after lights out, we tried to get on a bench or get strapped into some device so we could figure it all out. The coach was such a raging steroid adled asshole that he reserved certain machines (most of them) for the players. For those of us who had never heard of steroids or power lifting or reps or sets, we were lost. I think I spent more time in that class looking at the excellent student painted mural of the Pink Floyd Animals album cover than I ever did lifting a weight. I can still see myself standing there watching the inflatable pig floating over Battersea Power Station.

Upon getting my first weight set (if I remember right, I bought it out of money I made delivering papers), I sorrowfully attempted to teach myself how to lift them. I knew how to do a bench press but without a spotter I was basically doing very little good. I did all kinds of lifts but having one long bar, two short bars and 110 lbs of weights made things a bit more difficult. It would take me five minutes to reconfigure the whole deal so I could do a different type of lift. There were no spring loaded clips you young whipper snappers, we had clamps and wrenches to add a special level of difficulty to our workouts. Oh boy, was that ever a motivator!

Then there was the dad factor. He would say stuff like, "Well I bet you think you are pretty tough lifting weights!" My dad was never much for that type of physical exercise. He believed and still believes that keeping busy is exercise enough. I definitely was not overweight at the time but after watching all of the student athletes I felt woefully inadequate in the muscle department. Still, despite all of this, I kept at it. I lifted everyday which is antithesis to everything I know now. I was not building hardly any muscle at all even though I could break quite a sweat flailing about in the unfinished room in the basement. I was doing a good job of staying fit. By the time summer rolled around, I decided that perhaps running was the better option for me anyway.

I have to relate something funny my wife said the other day and it is almost completely off subject. We were talking about all the dogs we owned over the years. Now my wife Christy has a way of putting things out there without context which makes them even more hilarious. When she had her first interview here in Arizona she told me the following: "They told me not to sell my winter clothes." Now living in Arizona and her having just come down from Colorado that sounded pretty awful and pretty mean to me. I told her I was so sorry. She said, "No, they told me not to get rid of my winter clothes because it can get pretty cold here." See? Way different meaning in context.

So Christy sprang this on me in the middle of a conversation: "Well I had Sassy for a few years until she was eaten by wolves." I gave her a puzzled look because I didn't recall wild packs of wolves prowling the outskirts of Wichita in the 80's. Then she put it into context, "You know coyotes or whatever." Christy has lots of funny things she says that have endeared her to me even more. One of my favorite little phrases she says when exasperated: "That really drives me up a tree!" How can anyone not love a woman that cute?