Back to Work!

"Chuck Norris beats the odds... with his fists."

                     -Thomas, friend

I was able to go to the gym today for the first time in nearly two months. One could say that this trip cost me about $60. While I was happy to be able to move some weight plates around, I was unhappy to see that L.A. Fitness [Renton] had replaced the scale in the locker room with a common bathroom scale. They used to have a nice big one, the kind that you see at doctor offices with the physical weights that you have to manipulate and balance to get your number. Now, they have this crappy one that firstly barely accommodates me with my size ten.5 shoes (meaning it is completely inaccurate), and secondly maxes out at about 225. This is a gym -- half the guys walking around are more than 225 lbs! I was tempted to go into the women's locker room to see if I could use theirs, but I couldn't be sure that they would have a different type of scale in there.

To get the full benefit from my workout, I went home to immediately fix myself a protien shake. Usually I put the protien powder into a blender and make a smoothie with it, but today I went with the suggested serving size of two scoops. Anything more than a near-full scoop into the smoothie would make it all bubbly and nasty, so I went with the recommended instructions of mixing the two scoops of powder with sixteen ounces of cold water, made easier by my fancy twenty ounce blender bottle (a plastic cup with an enclosed top that contains a metal ball shaped whisk that you shake). It tasted like feet. But, I manned up and quickly downed it pinching my nose, making a mental note to get another flavor of protein powder next time.

The gist of the story is that I'm back at the gym, and glad to be back. Despite being half way through summer, I still may be able to mold a beach-ready body before the the autumn leaves start to fall. My baseball game definitely seems to be helped by the time I put into the gym pre-season, and I can feel what seem like legitimate abs under a flab of fat.

Err on a side note, there's a vicious rumor going around my work that I have washboard abs. I'm not going to prove anyone wrong by completely disgusting them after lifting up my shirt, so my only recourse is to get the washboard abs and fulfill the prophesy as told [read: spread] by my HR person.