Fit as a Fine-Tuned Fiddle
Always on the lookout for physical fitness programs, I decided a while back to check with the local university and see what they had to offer. Sure enough there was a program led by graduate students that met once a week, so I headed over to the PE complex to look into it. I started asking around and was eventually introduced to a nice young man who told me a little bit about the program and then handed me an absurdly large stack of forms. I was instructed to go home, fill out each one, and return only when all of them were completed and signed. From the looks of things, I would not be returning anytime soon.
When at long last all of my paperwork was in order, I showed up on the appointed day ready to work out. I was ushered into a room that held every imaginable form of exercise equipment and then told begin wherever I wanted. The idea was to work my way through the various machines at my own pace and strength level. The problem was I didn’t know how to use any of this equipment. At one point the instructor came over and told me I was sitting on one of those machines backwards. It was obvious that I needed some instruction so he took me around, explained each one, and showed me how to set what he thought was the appropriate resistance level for me. He then turned and left me to my own devices. I quickly found that I couldn’t budge any of this equipment at the settings he had chosen. Each time I used a new machine I had to wait until he wasn’t looking and then covertly reset it to a significantly lower level. I told myself I would build up.
This program really was for the most part a good one. There was, however, one minor problem. It was just too long. Each session lasted a full hour and a half. The last few minutes were spent on some group exercises, but most of that time was dedicated to working out on the exercise equipment, and we were all generally finished up within 30 or 40 minutes. Even working at an extremely leisurely pace, we couldn’t fill up that much time.
All of this extra time led to a lot of us wandering around the rooms striking up conversations. I didn’t see anything wrong with this. We were simply trying to find out what was going on with everything and everybody. Some might call it gossip, but I don’t look at it that way. I prefer to think of it as keeping abreast of everyone’s current situation. One does need to keep up, you know.
Unfortunately Covid came along and shut the whole thing down. I don’t know what’s going on with anybody anymore. I would also say that I’ve lost all the muscle tone I gained, but that wouldn’t be true. The fact of the matter is, I can’t really claim to have gained all that much to begin with.