gruntin' and groanin'

Let me start by informing you that I've gotten fat.

My fat pants are tight.

So I'm back at the gym.

I was a skinny kid growing up. Then discovered Tombstone pizza in junior high and it was a downhill slide to fattiness after that.

In college, I took the required P.E. class, and unlike a lot of folks, (and unlike myself in H.S.) I actually got something from it. I'll never forget the second class when we had to run for 12 minutes. I had NEVER run. I hated it. Never saw the need. And I was shocked as hell to discover that I could run (read jog) a mile in that 12 minutes. So I went back the next day just to see if I could do it again. And then I started seeing if I could run farther.

In the class, we learned nutrition stuff I'd never heard of before about fat and calories. So I started actually paying attention to what I was eating in the caf.

Lo and behold, weight started dropping off like a bad prom date.

By that summer I'd gone from over 230 down to something like 165 and I was running 10 miles a day.

A year later I ran a marathon.

SIDENOTE: I'll never understand folks who say that it's hard to loose weight in college. For christ's sake, you have a huge cafeteria with all the healthy food you could want already prepared (of course it's right next to the pizza, but...), a free gym (that you can walk to), and tons of people (in the same building) constantly around you supporting and helping you. In the real world you have to MAKE your own food, pay for the gym which you have to make an effort to drive to and, crap, you're lucky if you find one person who will work out with you.

My weight stayed off for a few years. I still ran, worked out, ate right. And then I started teaching. I was tired, lazy and had a teacher's lounge constantly stocked with chocolate.

All the weight came back.

I lost a lot of it a couple years ago, but got lazy again.

So now I'm back at the gym. I swim in the mornings and workout after school. But now I have a paid friend: a trainer. She rocks.

Something I've noticed, though, that I never noticed before: people make a lot of noise in the gym.

I'm used to hearing people overdo the grunts while lifting weights. But what's with the guys who are still grunting while drying off in the locker room? Or grunting while putting on clothes?

I hate them as much as I hate the people who talk to me while I'm dripping wet and naked.