A couple of weeks ago someone finally opened a gym in the tiny town 4 miles away. We took a look at it and promptly joined. The difference between a 40-50 minute round trip and a 15 minute round trip is the difference between actually getting some good out of the membership or not. It’s small, but it has all the essentials – strength machines and aerobic equipment, weights, a way to stretch and so forth. The couple who own it also know what they’re doing, which is a great help to people to whom physical conditioning of this sort is a complete mystery.
The day the owner introduced me to the strength machines, he gave me some guidelines for how to tell when I’d done enough, also advising me that I should see what felt possible, and then back it off a step so that I didn’t overdo it. If a 30 pound weight felt right, use a 20 pound weight; if it felt like I could do 15 repetitions with only a little strain do 12, and so forth. He also told me that the first week or two I was likely to feel utterly flattened on occasion, and that it meant I should back off a little more, working at a lower level until it didn’t flatten me and then adding one iteration. As he said, if it takes me a month to get to the next level instead of 2 weeks, nothing is lost.
He was right. I spent a couple of days in Indy dealing with Mom-stuff, came back last night, and went to the gym again today. Tonight I do indeed feel like a truck ran over me. I’m glad he warned me this would happen, because with the warning came the assurance that it wouldn’t be like this forever. If he was right about the first part, chances are he’s right about the second. I’m counting on it.