Day 9

Kickass lower body workout, check.
25 mins on elliptical, low impact, rudely interrupted halfway thru by some girl who unplugged all the ellipticals, check.

Today I planned to "practice" getting up early and going to the gym, since the next 2 days I have job interviews in the morning and other crap to do all day so I'm planning on hitting the gym early. Needless to say, I failed at getting up and going at 6:30. I got up, but then I laid in bed and listened to NPR (aka my alarm) and had dreams about the news and got out of bed at 8:30, with great difficulty. I finally made it to the gym around 10:30, and the freshmen are still arriving, in bigger numbers today. They were even in the gym, walking around with nametags on and parents in tow, gawking at those of us who went there to work out. I couldn't help but laugh - I can't believe that it's been so long since that was me. I was such a clueless, scared kid, and I had it easy settling into a small liberal arts school in the suburbs. It wasn't far from home, literally or figuratively.

Anyway, the workout was good. I had a bad attitude about doing cardio, but 25 minutes is an amount of time I can last with a bad attitude. In my gym-going glory days I used to bust out 45 minutes on the stepmill (aka Satan Machine), then hop on the elliptical for another 25-30 minutes. And I'd crawl home afterwards and have to eat as fast as possible so I wouldn't die. In retrospect, might've been a good idea to bring a granola bar or gatorade so I could get something in my stomach less than an hour after that marathon.