To gym or not to gym

I’m dithering over whether to go to the gym today. On the go side, I did eat too much at the barbecue yesterday, and am up to 285.5 pounds today. On the don’t go side, there’s a heat advisory in effect today. The temperature’s expected to get up to the nineties, with humidity making it feel like it’s over 100, and the gym’s air conditioning hasn’t been up to dealing with extreme heat in past years. But it’s only in the eighties now, and I think they might have improve the air conditioning during the last maintenance period.

Well, when I put it that way, it sounds like I ought to go. First I’ll finish off this glass of iced tea and toasted English muffin with marmalade.

Went to the gym

So I went to the gym. Forty minutes on the treadmill, reading Ted Chiang’s “Understand”. It was a bit warmer than I’d like (around 84°F, because I went in the morning), but not enough to give me heat exhaustion. That’s happened twice in previous summers, the heat exhaustion; the second time was much less severe because I recognized the oncoming symptoms from the first time.

Not one for staying home, despite the heat advisory (according to the news, by the afternoon it was 94°F, but with the humidity it felt like the boiling point of titanium), I zipped into the Union Square area, picked up tubes of Payne’s gray (pretty!) and quinacidrone red watercolor, had a bottle of nice cold Honest Tea berry tisane, then picked up a book I’d had my eye on for a while at Barnes & Noble: Hot Point Fitness, a fitness plan that looks like something I can easily segue into from my current activities. It combines aerobic excercise with weights and stretching. What attracted me to it is that lists multiple weight plans — one set of excercises on one day, another set on another day, etc. — and links each weights routine to a specific stretching routine. I’ve been wanting to vary my weights routines, but have been at a loss for how to do so.

Got emailed Q’s con report for Otakon (an anime convention), and was jealous of the good time she had. Ah, the energy of youth. Waitaminute — I never had that much energy when I was in my low twenties! I feel gypped! Maybe with the right excercises and diet I can look forward to an energetic middle age.