Thursday, June 26, 2008

Motivation via Cheerleaders

And no, I don't mean having a personal cheerleader (although that would be awesome). No, today, while I was doing my strength training set I was standing near a window at my gym which happens to look out over Wall Street right in front of the NYSE. There were Cameras everywhere, Lights, stages, people all dressed up in fancy suits talking to the aforementioned cameras, and the Nets Cheerleaders posing in/on/around a car. Yes, directly in my tired, sweaty, frustrated line of sight was a cadre of robotic-aly perfect shining examples of *who I'm supposed to be

*sigh*

Anyways, today I was tired again, in that "idontwannagotothegym, youcantmakeme" kind of way. But I went anyways. I got on the elliptical and that same competitiveness that used to keep me getting my butt kicked at karate kicked in again and I kept my speed up and matched my 29 1/2 minute time for the 3 mile mark. Woo! I did a different set of strength moves today, my triceps are killing me from all the work I've been doing so I tried to give them an easy day. Instead of doing the full arm workout, halfway through it I switched to doing some exercises from another FitSugar plan, doing side lunges, reverse lunges bicycle crunches (which by the way, hurt, in a good way) and I did my standard "Sensei Mark Special" crunches.

I actually got a full fifteen minutes of stretching in before my S.O. showed up for the second half of my cardio. At this point (due in part to the shiny perfectness of the damned cheerleaders) I was feeling defeatist, and exhausted. So I decided I was going to take a different tact on this stint on the elliptical. Instead of keeping the resistance (relatively) low and going for speed, I switched it up and put the resistance (again relatively) way up to 15 and just tried to keep a respectable pace. I had to drop the resistance at a couple points down to 13 as my legs started burning from the unaccustomed work, but as soon as my legs recovered I'd push it back up to 15. And somehow I managed to do close to 2 1/2 miles in the 30 minutes. Which tells me I can run faster than I've been, and should push myself next time to see how fast I *can* go.

All in all not a bad workout. Even if I didn't want to go ^_^
-Meg

2 comments:

Penny said...

Lunges are my enemy! We do them in my strength training class, and I always give up before anybody else and just stand there with my arms folded. I don't care, it's HARD! You must have awesome self-discipline to do them without a short muscly Greek guy shouting at you to feel the burn - R.E.S.P.E.C.T.

TA x

Unknown said...

hey meg, i just wanted to say, that reading your blog has helped to motivated me ;) i've been going to the gym again this week for the first time in a long time. ok so, it's not that much, but it is a start, and for me that is always the hardest part.

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