Extended Workout

by Pa Rock
Heavy Breather

I used to date a beautiful young lady (Hi, Susan!) who would drive her little sports car around the Wal-Mart parking lot for thirty minutes looking for the absolute closest-to-the-door parking spot that she could find. Never mind that she could have been in the store and out in the time it took her to find that exceptional spot, and don't even begin to tally up the wasted gas! It was a convenience thing.

So maybe after a hard day at work, people have some sort of innate right to try avoiding a long march across the hot asphalt. But what about the lunkheads who go to my gym here in sunny Arizona? There are some shady spots at the back of the lot, which is where I always head, but some of the more fit specimens of humanity like to sit in their tricked-out trucks and big-assed SUV's with the air conditioning running while waiting on something closer to the doors to open up. And then when they finally find a spot that suits them, they amble up to the front doors toting nothing more than a gym bag - and hit the button that automatically opens the doors!

It's a gym, genius! You're not there to primp and model athletic gear - you're there to sweat! Consider that trek across the length of the parking lot to be your warm-up for the treadmill, and pulling those big doors open will limber up your arms! Anything less would be as dumb as playing golf for the exercise and then renting a cart!

I think that I may have worked for the military too long!

Atypical Saturday

by Pa Rock

This is the first Saturday since February that I haven't been chained to the computer typing Rootbound columns into a blog. To celebrate, I went to the office and spent three-and-a-half hours catching up on the paperwork that piled up while I was in Texas. I didn't get completely caught up, but the backlog is now manageable.

After that I went to the gym. I expect to die at the gym someday...but that's okay. It will be the radical changes in temperature that do me in. I go into the gym from the oven called Arizona, walk on a treadmill in air-conditioned comfort, and occasionally use a couple of the weight machines - all of which begin to warm me up again. Then I go to the locker room (where it is cool) and change into my swim trunks and got sit in the very hot spa for twenty minutes. Then it's back to the cool locker room, the cool gym, out the front door, and back into Hell! (If I do die at the gym, I hope that it is in the large, bubbly spa! It is Nirvana!)

The spa today was fun. There are two actually, and each can accommodate fifteen or twenty people. The one that I was in this afternoon was fairly full, and at one end of the communal bath a young couple appeared to be very busy trying to breed. I suspect the reason that they weren't successful in their endeavor was that the warm churning water took the jack out of his hammer. Several other individuals in the spa looked as though they would be ready to jump in and help if need be, but the invitation never came. Instead the young man and his lady left and went to the lap pool which has cooler, non-turbulent water. I wonder if the water stayed that way?