Starling Fitness: Daily writings on Fitness, Diet, and Health

My friend Karen Rosenlund had a problem with her knees. Her doctor told her that she needed to take a weight training class in school so that she could get her knees stronger, and he showed her the exact exercises she needed to do. I took Weight Training because my friend Karen did. I needed to choose SOMETHING for gym, and this class had a friend in it.

Every day, we would dress for weight training and Karen would do the exercises that she needed to do for her knees. After that, we told the teacher that we were going to run a few laps around the auditorium for the rest of the class. He had suggested that as an alternative to working with weights every day. We would stretch, start running around the auditorium and keep running to the Photography Lab to see our other friend, Matt Sheffield.

I spent that entire semester in the Photography Lab, developing pictures I had taken with my 110 camera.

Weight Training had something called Maxs. They tested our Maxs at the first of the term. If we could beat them at the end of the term, we got an A. Just one more rep on each exercise and I could get an A. I didn’t know that at the first of the term, if I did, I wouldn’t have had to work as little as I did. For one day of the term, I pushed myself hard. The rest of the time, I developed grainy black and white pictures. Quite literally, the class was “No Sweat” for me.

Now, I wish I had paid more attention. I also wish the teacher had cared a little more. It would have only taken one checkup to see if we were actually running around the auditorium instead of sloughing. We were always back in time to change out of our gym clothes, but we never looked like we had been running for 30 minutes straight. He didn’t care. As long as we beat our Maxs, he was happy.

I have been doing the circuit training at 24 Hour Fitness for the last month or so and I’m enjoying the progress. It feels so good to be able to lift more weight than I did a couple of weeks ago. Sure, there is pain, but it’s not as bad now as it was the first two weeks. If I had known the sense of accomplishment that I would get from weight training, I might not have been so quick to run off to the Photography Lab.

I guess it wasn’t my time to learn that lesson…