So everyone is probably back to some kind of exercise routine, because...January! I commandeered the workout wagon again in September, when I realized the adventure race I had run three years previously would decimate me now, prompting me to recruit "a guy" to show up on my doorstep twice a week to whip me back into shape. The guy has a name (it's Chris), but my co-workers think it's funny when I have to leave right on time on Wednesdays and Fridays because my "guy" is coming. There are lots of potential guy-themed jokes to be had, and we've had them all.
But if you're starting a workout regimen anew for 2017, here are five no-fail tips that I actually can't offer a guarantee on, but yeah, they're pretty good:
1. Always exercise on Mondays.
2. Treat every day like a new day and a chance to start fresh (even on Tuesday if you didn't follow Rule No. 1 and exercise on Monday).
3. Drink lots of water. Not drinking water can make you tired. Science!
4. Listen to excellent music.
5. Invite "a guy" to come to your house twice a week.
I haven't consistently kept up with the CD/exercise experiment I started a year and a half ago, because I'm lazy and there's work and kids and trying to write other stuff and other stuff in general, but I'm not psyched about what I see looking outward lately, so I'm retreating back to temporary inwardness to hold me over till...whenever.
Now that that's out of the way:
Length: 1 hour
Activity: 45 minutes treadmill, 5 minutes power exercising, 10 minutes stretching
What listening to this album made me think of: I cranked up the "Frankie Goes to Hollywood" channel on Pandora, which gave me enough synthesized fodder to get through the worst of it. It made me think about a bunch of things, because there were a bunch of songs:
• 18-minute remix version of "Relax" by Frankie Goes to Hollywood:
All I could think about was a) when is this remix ending, because even though I like this song I want a different song now, and b) how I was mortified when I found out, at around the age of 14, what "when you want to come" meant.
• "Hold Me Now" by the Thompson Twins:
This really is a beautiful, if clichéd, song, but I laugh whenever I hear it because my first boyfriend and first real heartbreaker once wrote me an amorous letter and included this at the end: "You say I'm a dreamer, we're two of a kind. Both of us searching for some perfect world we know we'll never find."
Maybe it was the subterfuge of my Cyrano removing the song-break slashes and swapping in commas and periods, and yeah, it did sound incredibly familiar to me when I first took it all in, and sure, there probably should've been some sort of red flag (I didn't recall any conversation when I had broached his dreamer status). But I was so infatuated that my brain short-circuited and I thought it was the most romantic thing anyone in the history of Planet Earth had ever written to anyone else, a glowy delusion I absorbed into my DNA and that probably kept the relationship going far longer than it was meant to go. It was only a few months after we had broken up and I was seeking closure through old letters when I came across this, suddenly pinpointed the origin, and thought, "Figures."
• "Always Something There to Remind Me" by Naked Eyes:
This song evoked no emotion.
• "Suicide Blonde" by INXS:
This is my least favorite INXS song, yet my most favorite INXS song to work out to.
• "Hungry Like the Wolf" by Duran Duran:
Friends from junior high.
• "Just Like Heaven" by The Cure:
I've always hated The Cure, a loathing exacerbated by the fact that a girl who lured a college boyfriend from me was a Cure devotee. Hate (even though I don't really hate her/him anymore, just the feeling it dredges up) = running impetus.
• "True Faith" by New Order:
This song led me back to thinking outwardly, which I DO NOT WANT TO DO RIGHT NOW, but luckily it was the last song of the workout.
Review: I liked all of the songs except the Cure song, but I made it work for me because that's how I roll.
How I felt after: Annoyed when my parents showed up at the 40-minute mark and my dad started taking pictures of me on the treadmill. Good otherwise, though still fighting the asthma that has returned over the past couple of months to torture me.
Random fact I learned about these artists/albums: I didn't know "Relax" was banned by the BBC, though not surprising. Nice!
Why I'm doing this: See Day 1.
Tweets and treats at @jenngidman.
