My job comes with some sweet perks. Aside from the ridiculous 17% that my employer contributes towards my retirement, They also provide $20 a month to anyone who wants to join a fitness club. Lucky for us, we work on a campus that has a pretty sweet ass recreation center that charges $23 a month for employees or affiliates of OSU. So, yeah, I took advantage of that and got myself a membership to Dixon.
Ten years ago, I used to play basketball for a couple hours a day at Dixon, and while I wasn't even close to the best player out there, I could hold my own and had a reputation as a "sneaky good" chubby guy who could take advantage of people with better physiques who thought I'd start wheezing and collapse after a few times up and down the court.
Now I am that wheezy collapsing dude. I'm the opposite of a Twinkie - I've got about a twenty minute shelf life before I expire.
So how do I fix it? Well, by supplementing my court time with some cardio of course! Dixon has an excellent cardio room, but I have to remember to put my dignity in my gym bag with my towel.
The cardio room consists of largely two groups of people: college girls in spandex and slightly doughy male faculty and staff of the university in their 30's and 40's who have bad knees and need low impact exercise. I'll let you take a stab at which category I fall into. Where are all the college guys, you ask? Well, they're on the basketball court, of course! (Or in the weight room, but as I have never had the desire to ever set foot in a weight room, I just pretend like they don't exist.) I arrived at Oregon State in the fall of 1997, and I've never left. My mind still thinks I'm a basketball player, but my body very clearly indicates that I am in fact a doughy ellipticaller. And while you might be thinking "Yeah, but if you keep going every day, eventually you'll be a basketball player again," you're wrong. I've been down this path before. Every two years or so, I say "that's it....I'm changing my lifestyle. I'm dedicating myself to getting healthy." Never happens. Turns out that internal motivation is a recessive allelle.....I'm the mm in the Punnett Square of the Motivational trait.
