I wonder how much longer it’s going to be until I can say that I actually enjoy doing a workout on this cross-trainer…any ideas? I’m starting to think I won’t ever get there. I mean it’s been two months now since it moved in and spoiled the feng shui in my bedroom, and I still have to force myself to climb aboard the damn thing and show willing.
If I’m brutally honest its very presence annoys me, and whilst I’m grateful for the effect it’s having in helping me build my fitness from the lowest possible base, I wish I could tuck it away somewhere unobtrusive. I guess that’s the drawback of living in a cottage the size of a shoebox, especially when you have a grown up man-child who shows no inclination of leaving home!
Everyone who knows about these things tells me that I’ll get to the point where I can just go into a zone for hours, without batting an eyelid. I’ve stopped calling it the hurt machine now because the reality is, it doesn’t really hurt that much any more. I no longer climb off feeling like I need hooking up to an iron lung and my legs function normally even after 45 minutes of activity…mind you I haven’t tinkered with the harder settings yet so I’m sure there’s more pain to rediscover at some stage. To be fair it’s not the pain I’m bothered about. It’s the boredom.
I’ve tried listening to music whilst I’m beavering away, and if the music’s not helping me get into my stride it’s planted right in front of a TV , so there’s no shortage of entertainment. I’ve got five hundred channels at my fingertips right there, but I still lose the will to live within the first ten minutes. Pushing through pain became the norm, certainly in the early days and I got quite adept at that but I’m here to tell you that pushing through the boredom is proving a much harder nut to crack.
How is it, that I can be completely gripped by some drama or other when I’m sitting in the armchair doing nothing more strenuous than stroking the dog, and yet the minute I’m strutting my funky stuff and breaking a bead of sweat upstairs in front of the same entertainment menu, nothing holds my interest beyond the first five minutes..? I invariably end up risking life and limb flicking through the channels whilst I’m mid-stride and given the amount of moving parts I know that one of these days it’s not going to end well.
I’m thinking maybe its Asshole driven, you know? Maybe there’s some kind of trip-switch in my head where as soon as the cavernous yoga pants come out and the trainers go on, he sprints from his stool in the corner of my head and flicks the switch to ‘bored’ since pain failed to dent my determination and it’s one of the few options open to him. Hell, he’s probably got KPIs to hit like the rest of us, right?
I know what the experts say, about exercise being like a drug and once it gets you it really gets you. I just don’t get it. And that’s a bit of a bummer. I want to get it. I’ve tried really hard and I swear I’m not going to give up but it would be lovely to stride towards it, even just one time, without wishing I could take a lump hammer to the dratted thing and burn the equivalent amount of calories smashing it to smithereens 🙂
