Oriented at the Y

I finally found time to join the Blaisdell Y Thursday morning. I stopped in on my way to work. It's pretty much on the way if I take the 36th St. entrance. Last night I stopped on my way home from work for my orientation/free fitness consultation with Tony, one of their personal trainers. Tony was pleasant enough, but really didn't know any more about fitness than I do, so this wasn't a life-changing experience. He did, however, give me some tips on using the surprisingly extensive array of elliptical machines. My, my, my these things have come a long way from the old stair steppers! The Life Fitness ones I've used before; in fact that's the equipment in the gym at work so I probably won't use it at the Y. The best ones were the Proteus machines, which have not only a resistance adjustment but an incline adjustment as well. There is a little illuminated man on the control panel with glowing green lights illuminating the muscles that are in use with the current incline setting! This is so cool. Besides the entertainment factor, this feature approximately doubles the amount of time I can manage on the machine before I collapse; adjusting the incline setting changes the combination of muscles in a rather subtle way, but it does give your legs a new lease on life for a while. And the controls are easy and intuitive, including a Quickstart mode that is actually easy to use!

Other things I like better than I expected to:
* a hidden exercise area upstairs next to the suspended-balcony running track. Finding a place to stretch out can be awkward in health clubs jammed with equipment, and even when there is a stretching area set aside it's usually limited to a mat or two in an uncomfortably public location where you feel like people are practically stepping over you. This little stretching bay has mats, a couple of fitness balls, and is separated from the track by an iron railing that is exactly the right height for leaning on to do calf stretches.

* An adults-only locker room, conveniently located on the top floor near the track/stretching area.

* A bathing suit centrifuge in the locker room. Haven't seen one of those since I briefly belonged to Northwest Racquetball (now part of the Lifetime empire).

Things I didn't like quite as well as expected:
* The inconsiderate mother that brought her entire rowdy, screaming extended family (including little boys!) into the adults only locker room! I hope this doesn't happen all the time. I assume the entire point of the adult locker room is to avoid this particular situation.

* The pool. Which was my main reason for joining. The pool room is blazing hot (which is better than freezing cold, but not optimal) and both times I was there it was packed to the rafters. It's a 6-lane pool and they multi-task it, with at least a couple of lanes reserved for lap swimming almost all the time. But I'm definitely NOT going to want to swim there when Open Family Swim is going on in the other lanes! Since it was so boisterous in there last night I spent all my time exploring the fitness areas. I'm hoping that the 9-10 pm lap swim is a little more sedate.

I really had fun with the exercise equipment, and since the track had that lovely stretching area next to it I even stretched out at the end of my workout (which I rarely do - I usually just walk to cool down). This did not, however, stop me from being stiff and sore all over today. I didn't really do THAT much - just tried out a lot of equipment. It never fails to surprise me how out of shape my muscles get if I don't use every single one of them every day. Oy.

Ouch.

My external hard drive went dead, taking my iTunes library with it. Also my entire photo collection, but I have that backed up in several locations. I was using the Maxtor drive as my main storage drive, so I may have lost a few photos that I hadn't backed up, but nothing important. However, if I have to rip in my entire CD collection again, that will be a real drag.

So off I went to MicroCenter to buy another external drive. While I was at it, I took ssussminh's advice and picked up a 32G thumb drive. My record collection is substantial, but not massive, and should easily fit on that as a backup medium. The drive to and from Microcenter was awful (I just can't get used to the idea that there is a full-fledged rush hour on Saturday!) and as ssussminh had warned me, Microcenter is an absolute zoo on weekends. But I did have the pleasure of running into mle292 and vanaabegra in the hard disk aisle where we carried on a boisterous conversation about pornography (we were in the hard drive aisle after all) and vampire taps.

On the way home I picked up some Chinese food (Richard and thorintatge are elsewhere this evening) and gobbled it down while listening to the end of "Prairie Home Companion." That was kind of nice after the long, frustrating drive home.

Unfortunately now I have to venture out again, as I promised myself I would catch the adult open skate session at Eden Prairie, which looks like it might be the last one for the forseeable future. Ice rink schedules are so evanescent; you have to take advantage of opportunities when they're there.