Yesterday was a big day here at Wyldswood North.
The last time Peg and I darkened the door of a fitness center was some time around the first week of March last year. Covid was starting to show up at Fort Walton Beach Medical Center, where Peg was working at the time, and an evening arrived when we sat around the dining room table and decided it wasn't safe to sweat and puff our way through a weightlifting circuit or half hour on the elliptical machine in our almost entirely maskless county there in the panhandle. It would be almost exactly a year before we would resume our fitness regimen.
That sounds sort of sorry, but I did do what I could to slow my inevitable senescence as I settled into working remotely. I ran up and down 30A until nagging plantar fasciitis rendered it too excruciating to continue. By the time that resolved, we were almost entirely living on the farm, and a couple dodgy attempts to run down the fog line along the roads around the farm, and resultant close encounters with the side mirrors of my neighbors' monster trucks as they sped by, convinced me that the brushes with death weren't worth the health benefits. So, with the exception of the exertions of farm life, exercise stopped.
Add a few cocktails, and Peg's delicious and abundant table, and the inevitable happened. Even a diet of sticks and twigs, in sufficient volume, has consequences.
As Peg remained lithe and lovely, my clothes started to shrink. During my compulsive pacing on conference calls most days, I found myself gulping for breath whenever I need to speak. My blood pressure went from a tad too high, an inevitable consequence of my profession it seems, to listening to my pulse pound in my ears in a steady, ringing drumbeat.
The guy who once ran seven marathons was disappearing into a squishy, unhealthy blob.
Two days ago P decided she'd had enough of watching the downward spiral, and insisted it was time for us to return to the gym. She's vaccinated, and I've gotten better about wearing a mask and not picking my nose when I'm bored. We decided restarting our exercise routine in an enclosed space, the only real option here in the frozen north in February, was worth the risk.
So with that, we became members of the Corning YMCA.
Like everything in Corning, the facility is spotless and aesthetically pleasing, and offers all sorts of exercise options. I'm told it used to include even more, but group exercise offerings like Body Pump are a casualty of the pandemic. There's a big indoor pool, which I anticipate will be a focus of P's workout routine because she loves to swim laps. I swim like old people fornicate, so I'll just wave at her through the window between the weight room and the pool.
Until the pandemic, my exercise regimen had not changed since my high school football days. Even-odd: lift weights one day, run the next. Rinse and repeat. The amount of weight has eroded over the years, as has the mileage, but the routine remains the same.
Last evening, our first trip to the Y, was a weight day. Peg rode the recumbent bike while I made my circuit through the weights, complying with the local rules by wearing a mask and spraying a rather pungent disinfectant liquid all over the machines and the weights at the beginning and end of my workout at each station. I pulled way, way back on the amount of weight I was pushing--the first day back after a layoff is always a moment for false optimism. I am always amazed at how little strength I'd lost, overdo it, and two days later can't raise my arms. This time around I didn't fall into the trap, although I'm betting come Friday my pecs will be screaming.
A snowy morning in Corning, with a few flurries dancing in nascent sunshine outside my window. Two days of online CLE are on the docket for the balance of the week, then perhaps some fun new venue with P for Valentine's Day weekend.
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