Notes from the gym:

• The gym plays a strangely eclectic selection of music. 50 Cent is in heavy rotation, but there isn't much other hop-hop. There's a lot of '80s pop and '70s classic rock, and then just a whole lot of random. I was doing a chest exercise the other day and I almost dropped the weight when I heard over the speakers, "S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y Night!" Other than me, who else finds the Bay City Rollers to be motivational gym-type music?!
  
• My workouts are three "days"--a chest and back day, a legs daym and an arms and abs day. I do each day twice a week. I also put in a stint on the exercise bike each day--originally 35 minutes, but now I'm up to 40. I program the bike for "cardio", which means the bike adjusts resistance to maintain a more or less constant heartrate, based on your age. Right now I claim to be 45 years old--this allows me to maintain a heart rate at aroud 140. I am working my way toward my actual age of 28, which would mean maintaining a heart rate of 154. When I started, I was "60" which meant a heart rate of 126.
  
• The reason the bike routine gets stepped up very gradually is that I have big strong legs from the basic act of locomotion when I was so heavy, and this means the resistance has to be pretty high for me to keep my heart rate high. The plus side of this is that I burn a lot of calories--over 500 a sitting if the meter is to be trusted. The downside is that between the 8 and 16 minutes marks I always have an internal monologue about whether this is the day I don't make it through the whole workout. But so far so good, I guess.
  
• The parking lot at the gym is free from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., but during the day you have to pay. As a gym member you get a passcard that opens the gate, but at 7:10 a.m. it shuts off and you have to pay at the booth. It so happens that my schedule has me finishing up between 7 and 7:20 every morning, so I've always got a mental debate going on about whether I should do that extra set or get to the gate before I have to pay. It adds a fun tension to the workout, and a useful sense of urgency not to dawdle on exercises longer than necessary.
  
• For about 10 days the satellite that feeds music to all the clubs in the 24 Hour Fitness chain was malfunctioning, so we had no music at all. Working out in silence is eerie. Instead of a beat you just get a few seconds of silence and then a clank as plates come together somewhere.
  
• There's something disheartening about consistently having to remove most of the weight on a machine, and I most consistently have to do this on chest machines. For some reason, I have no chest muscles. Or rather, when I started I had no chest muscles--now I have almost no chest muscles.
  That said, there is a special section of hell reserved for the people who do 1,000 pounds on the leg press machine, and then don't remove any of the plates when they're done. Preparing for my 270-pound presses after those people is actually an exercise in and of itself. Given the chance, I will smite them.
  
• The gym is, of course, a voyeuristic as well as a physical experience. I find girls working out very sexy--ok, they're more likely to be fit because they work out, but what I actually mean is the process. Specifically, there is a row of Stairmasters in front of the row of bikes, and a shapely girl on a Stairmaster is a sight to behold--everything that should be nicely accentuated is. The only machine that has anything on the Stairmaster is something called the Butt Blaster. On the butt blaster, the exerciser assumes what for lack of a better term I'll call the doggie-style receiver position. They then take one foot and put it onto a pad that they kick back from their body at about a 45-degree angle. Again, if the person exercising has the figure for it, the effect is downright disarming.
  
• Suffice it to say that in Southern California such voyeuristic experiences are common, but also varied. People of every shape, size, race, color, creed--whatever--go to my gym. Sometimes I'll even see a woman of Middle Eastern descent on a cardio machine wearing full head cover and head to toe robes. I'm not sure how one can work on, say, the elliptical machine that way, but they seem to manage. I of course prefer the sports bra and shorts or tights look (to see, not to wear), but to each her own.
  
• Not that anyone should, say, take the MCAT based on my knowledge of anatomy and physiology, but my understanding is that when you lose fat and build muscle, you produce less estrogen and more testosterone, and therefore certain drives and whatnot tend to start raging. I don't know if this is true or if having this "knowledge" produces some sort of placebo effect, but looking back on the second half of this entry does nothing to dissuade me of this idea, and it also describes my recent physical state pretty accurately.
  
• Yeah, I know, too much information.