Mature Exercisers...

Gees, I hate to exercise...Oh yeah, I know it's good for you and you'll feel better after doing it.  But the truth is, exercise is a pain in the ass.   All you exercise nut cases out there will bemoan the fact that I'm berating your exercise, but to tell the truth, I don't care what you think.  Go ahead, beat yourselves up, work up that sweat, maneuver those joints and muscle...you do that...I'll watch.

OK, so the truth is, I have to exercise to keep the old joints lubed and also so I can continue to move my arms and legs.  I've fought it for a long time, but I finally caved and joined my neighborhood YMCA. I felt very pleased with myself when I took the plunge and joined after procrastinating for about....10 years.

I walked into the reception area and met with sweet young things...Yeah, you guessed it, all perky and cute.  They're lucky I was in a good mood that morning, that or the fact they offered me coffee as I did the tour around the torture chambers they refer to as the gym. It was cool.  I found things very interesting, clean and not too shabby.  I signed up.

The perky kids gave me an arm load of paperwork with all the schedules and rules and regulations about the gym.  I went home and read through everything as though I was studying for a test.  I knew the next day I was going to partake in a new and different way of life just by walking through those doors into the hallowed halls of exercise Nirvana...yeah..right...

The next day dawned bright and cheery until I remembered I made this promise to myself to jump into this exercise thing with gusto.  At the gym I was greeted by some computer voice welcoming me into the caverns of pain and ...more pain...

I figured since I was so out of shape I should start really easy, so off I went to he huge room full of machines.  Machines that sculpted blobs of fat into smooth silky sensuous bodies. Machines that could make a grown man cry. Machines that could cause cardiac arrest, I was sure.  

There were ten of machines empty, so I jumped onto one and started playing with the buttons.  Little screens with weird looking silhouettes of people showed up on the screen. Some of them I'm sure were trying to run from my constant pushing of the buttons to make them do things. I have no idea what I was doing, nor did I really care...

After a couple of minutes an Adonis with long hair came over to the machine I was on and asked, "Did you sign in for that machine?"  I thought, "What? Sign in for what?" There was no one on any of the 10 machines around me.  I looked at him and said, "I'm terribly sorry but I have no clue what you're talking about nor do I know anything about signing up for a machine". He looked at me and just sighed, then said, "We all must sign up for any machine we'd like to use.  We allow 30 minutes on a machine and there is a sort of protocol for our machines...".  Protocol?  What the Hell?? So there I am first day, breaking "protocol".  Who knew? I sure didn't....When Perky little thing was doing her little tour with me she neglected to explain the "protocol" of the Machine room....Oh well. That was just the beginning of life at the Y.

In the masses of paperwork I received on sign up day, there were schedules and change of schedules as well as changes to the change of schedules.  I was confused.  I figured out most of the schedules but I was a bit intimidated by all the potential "protocol" things I could screw up.  I chose some classes to take which I thought would be pretty easy to do and I figured there couldn't be too much "protocol" to mess up..

Man, was I wrong.....to be continued...