Stop me if you’ve heard this before: I joined a gym and started exercising regularly.
If you haven’t heard this before, you must not have been a regular reader of this blog in its first couple of years. Don’t despair, I’ll recap: In late 2007, I joined a gym that was conveniently collocated with my place of work in London’s Canary Wharf. I lasted several months and, while the exact moment of when I stopped was not recorded anywhere, about a year later I was already musing on why I could never stick with the program in the first place.
Not sure if I mentioned anywhere then that it was not the first time I attempted to fit fitness into my lifestyle. And not the first time I failed.
These days, I am again conveniently located close to a gym. And, feeling all mid-life-crisisy, I have a new urge to change my perpetual out-of-shape existence. Plus, one of my best friends gave me an inadvertent push, while describing the benefits of his own exercise regimen that he has been following for several years now.
Long story short, I joined a NYSC across the street from my current office location. With the difference between single-club membership cost and that of all-locations membership fairly negligible, I opted for the latter, which allows me to go to a club within 10 minutes driving distance from my house.
It’s already been over a month now. The timing factor is still there (and nowadays, I deal with a 3.5-hours overall commute that was not in play in England). The boredom factor is there as well. The impatience for seeing results – which are not in a hurry to become obvious – keeps testing my resolve. But the monetary outlay is now significant enough that I just might use the desire to get my money’s worth as an added incentive.
I actually splashed on four “introductory” sessions with a personal trainer, each of which left me in a state of being barely alive. On one hand, having a trainer direct me for an hour definitely helped in keeping the pace and possibly having a more useful workout. On the other hand, I somewhat dreaded the third and fourth installments and almost tried to avoid them. The challenge now is to find the proper balance on my own, where I can keep up and feel the workouts’ worth, yet not run myself into the ground.
Somehow, I am blindly optimistic that if I see good results from my nearly daily trips to the gym, I will be able to stick with it for longer than on my previous attempts. You are all free to set up a pool for how long I’ll last.
I’ll be sure to let you know if I flame out again. If someone wants to ensure winning the pool, make me an offer 😉