I wish I was athletic. Or at least moderately athletic; I wish I was athletic enough to not get winded after jogging for a few minutes. I’m not going to lie; I don’t really watch sports that often, mainly because professional athletes make me feel really bad about my athletic ability, or lack thereof. The few times that I do watch however, an athletes’ dexterity and ability to work hard and play hard is amazing to me.
Just the other day I was watching a basketball game and I was truly awestruck by how athletic some people are. These players are running back and forth around the court taking very few breaks, and I’m just sitting on the couch refusing to get up to get chips because “it’s too much work.”
Instead of feeling sorry for myself, I figured it would be a good idea if I went out and tried to make myself more athletic. I renewed my membership at Lifetime Fitness (a membership I had in eighth grade for two weeks), and started going. Immediately upon entering the doors, I felt out of place. I was surrounded by people who were a lot more fit than I, and they were there for the sole purpose of increasing muscle mass. It took me about five minutes, but I finally managed to get past the barrage of males in their early twenties who were crowding the lobby and bragging to their friends how much weight they can handle: “dude, I’m so ready to lift today. I’ve been preparing for today all of this week bro. Bro, do you even lift?” I pushed my way past them and found the first available treadmill. Oh boy, was that an experience.
What I thought was a treadmill is actually apparently something called an “elliptical,” so that was a good way to start out a workout initiative. I had already gotten on to the machine and didn’t want to get up and find a real treadmill so I just stayed on there and it actually wasn’t that bad. At least for the first couple minutes. I conquered the machine and felt really good about myself , that is until I had crossed the four minute threshold. After that my legs started giving out on me (and understandably, seeing as I hadn’t genuinely worked out in several months) I decided it was time to get off. But I didn’t want to look weak in front of the other members working out, I needed to play it off cooly. Curious to know what my brilliant plan was? It was to pretend my iPod was a phone and I was getting a call. It worked well until I dropped it; there is no recovering from that.
All in all, my first workout regime which lasted a solid 15 minutes went pretty well. That’s a lie, it wasn’t very good and that experience in fact discouraged me from ever having motivation to workout again. If I really wanted to get buff, I figure I could just photoshop muscles onto myself. Photoshop solves everything.
