Competition

I’m a competitive person, I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing though. You see last night, I was a bit tired, I’d had another grim day at work. The nights are drawing in now and I quite fancied being at home chilling out with a bottle of wine in front of a roaring log fire. But instead I dragged myself back to the gym for another session of sweat and pain because I saw this as a chance to gain some ground on Nigel in the fitness stakes. On the other side of the coin though, I am pushing myself really hard to keep up with / overtake Nigel, and this is almost certainly how I did my injury in the first place.

Anyway, I saw Fitness Stu last night and told him about my injury and how I am not to work my shoulder. He said no problem, so next Tuesday night we are going to create a new, shoulder friendly plan.

In the meantime I just did some cardio work on the cross trainer. Cranked it up to level 10 (I still don’t know what this is worth) and set the time to 40 minutes on the “Fat Burn” setting. The fat burn setting increases the resistance every minute or so, before dropping the difficulty back down towards the end.

10 minutes on the cross trainer and I was generating a sweat. 20 minutes in and I was starting to wonder why I had set it to 40 minutes. 30 minutes in and I actually got pins and needles in my feet and was perspiring so much there was a possibility I might drown standing up. 35 minutes in I must have passed out a little bit because I remember the last five minutes as a blissful walk in the park.

Have you ever spent time on a boat at sea, and then got onto dry land and found that you walk a bit weird as the ground seems to still move. Well I sort of had this when I stepped off the cross trainer, combined with the fact that my feet had gone to sleep and I was half blinded by my sweat dripping into my eyes, I did a kind of Thunderbirds walk across the gym.

I had sweated so much that my clothes were saturated and I think a haze of steam was rising from my body, I opted to not use the other machines and saved myself the embarrassment of having to mop up bum sweat from the seats. I did the Plank and hand to knee core exercises and then called it a day.

I am going again tonight and this time I will save the fat burning cross trainer until I have worked the other machines.