One thing... one thing... leads to anoooooother!

Well with all the blogging about eating and stuffing my face, you knew I had to end up here...

Yes... the gym.

Around May of 2006 I decided that I was fat and that I needed to make a change. Looking at old pictures from 2005, I can verify that I was indeed pretty porky. It started with evening powerwalks around the track at Kalani High School in Aina Haina (Honolulu). Luckily I had a great group of friends who were very supportive and joined me each evening for a 4 mile adventure! Kori and I would "take a trip down memory lane" and reminisce about the olden days while coming up with an evil theme for the track and its surroundings (oh there's Satan's shish-kebab (the basketball hoop), there's a pile of dead bodies under that big mound of dirt, and then... best one... we had to NOT be the last one to yell DOUBLE DEVIL PITCHFORK as we ran past this huge metal thing that looked like two pitchforks). Soon we had lots of other friends joining us on the track. Mike, Deanne, Lauren and many others would make these nights fun and more like hanging out than working out. Some nights it was just me and my ipod, which was fine too.

Before I knew it, it was August and time to go back to school. By then I'd lost a significant amount of weight and was loving the reaction I was getting from everyone at school. It was then that I decided that physical fitness would need to be part of my life forever. I couldn't imagine carrying around all that extra weight anymore.

When I went to visit my parents in Boston over winter break, I joined the gym there for a few weeks, which was scary at first (being my first gym experience since...umm... high school), but I learned how to use the machines and found out that the gym wasn't so scary after all.

In Germany I joined McFit, which was only €16,90 per month, and learned more about machines and how to get the most out of my gym experience. With my faithful workout buddy Michal from Poland (who was more often than not just a pain in the ass), I managed to stay in decent shape another year.

Getting back to Academia Bodybase (academia means gym in Portuguese)...

I joined up in February last time I was in Porto Alegre and enjoyed the more personal approach to fitness. The trainer I'm working doesn't speak any English, so it was great that Will was able to translate for us.

This time around I have to go to the gym alone because of Will's work schedule, but between my infantile Portuguese vocabulary and a lot of hand gestures and embarrassed smiles, the trainer and I can pretty much understand each other. I haven't really messed anything up...yet.

So yeah, I love to stuff my face, but then I just try to build a little muscle and burn a little fat at the gym without overdoing it and I basically break even.

It's also a great way to totally immerse yourself in a new culture and language. Sometimes I feel like I'm a total voyeur, intently observing the social interaction between different kinds of people while trying to understand what they're saying (or not saying) to each other. Gym culture is strange anyway, awkwardly polite but not too friendly, but I guess that's the same everywhere (unless you're at one of those gyms where everyone's wacked out on steroids...)

That's about all I have to say right now... I've recently noticed that each time I go to the gym (I go five times per week at roughly the same time every day) and I'm on the treadmill, this song comes on:



Hey I guess it's not SO bad... it's got a nice little fitness theme to it!

On Friday I was trying really hard not to laugh because I just knew that it was going to come on when I was on the treadmill... Monday will be yet another struggle!