So I've booked my first session with my personal trainer at the gym. His name is Scott. I think I finished the phone call with something like "OK Scott, I'll see you Tuesday night at 7pm. Yep I'm looking forward to it." Then immediately felt weird and looked around my office to see if there was anyone listening in.
I'm not really sure what to expect. The session is an hour long, which seems like a long time to be doing weights on my own, although I guess he'll probably be keen for me to do that stretching stuff trainers are always talking about. Perhaps even some cardio, although I'm not really interested in running in a gym on a treadmill. It just seems too easy to step off once the going gets a little tough.
I was talking to Mirjana about whether Scott would be anything like those personal trainers from The Biggest Loser. We agreed it would be cool if I could also discuss my hopes and fears with him, and perhaps cry in his arms from time to time. Not sure how I'd raise this with him, or if he'd even be open to it. Of course it would all have to happen within my allocated hour, I know that much.
Today I bought an ipod shuffle. I suppose I didn't really need one, and there are people starving in Africa, but they wouldn't really get much use out of it anyway since they don't have computers in their villages. I think.
I've already got a regular ipod, which i use pretty much every day, whether on the bus or hooked up to the stereo in my car, and I don't know how long I'd last without it. Actually I do know, since when my old ipod finally broke I think I waited about 4 or 5 hours before buying a new one.
As I see it my ipod shuffle has a few advantages over my regular ipod:
1. It's small (actually tiny), and clips onto articles of clothing, making it ideal for my foray into the world of physical fitness. Which means it saves me from having to have conversations with anyone at the gym, and allows me to just smile, nod, or shrug my shoulders, depending on what message I'm trying to convey.
2. It's burnt orange, which I think looks rather snazzy (see picture). I weighed up the colour choice quite seriously, also considering the green, but feel confident I made the right decision. I got the last orange one in the store. That's got to count for something.
3. It only holds 240 songs, in comparison to the 7,500 odd songs my other ipod holds. I used to think that the more songs the better, but I've come to realise that I don't listen to most of them, and they only make it harder to find the stuff I do listen to. I defy anyone to name 1,000, let alone 7,000 good songs. There just haven't been that many good songs written. Anyway the music geek in me is looking forward to coming up with the perfect 240 song playlist for this thing.
So this week I joined up at a gym. I've been down this path before, and it doesn't usually end well, but what the hell, I'll give it another shot.
When I signed up they put forward a couple of options - signing a twelve month contract, which would be much cheaper, or going month to month. Obviously, given my past history, I went with the month to month option. I probably would have preferred day to day, or even hour to hour, but they didn't offer that.
Anyway, its all quite expensive - this is going to be the most expensive exercise I've ever done - but hopefully that motivates me to go regularly.
Despite my new status as a gym member, I'm saying right now that I'm not going to be taking this too far. I'm not going to start eating raw eggs, or subsituting protein shakes for meals. I may or may not experiment with steroids, I haven't decided yet. I'm leaning towards not though.
I have little interest in the social aspect of the gym, since I'm not looking for a girlfriend, and in my (admittedly limited) experience, most of the guys who go to the gym are jerks. Who knows though, maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised.
It probably sounds like I'm not too impressed with the whole thing, and that's not really true. At this stage I'm motivated and keen to get into it and see what type of results I can get. If they are positive, I'll provide updates. If not, let's just pretend this whole thing never happened.
Here's a few pics from our poker game at Murray and Amanda's Friday night. Sadly, I didn't manage to catch the look on Murray's face when Corey was explaining how many calories were in his special diet beers.
The games varied in length from about 2 hours for the first one, till only 30 minutes or so for the last one. Not really sure what happened there but everyone was playing really loose.
I won the first game in a heads up with Ando, but then he came back and beat me in the same situation in games two and three - more than fair really since I kind of won on a fluke in game one.
After poker Alen turned up from some weird-ass play at the Fringe and we played darts. Which I pretty much sucked at. Good thing no money was involved there.
So my friend Mirjana started her own blog, mainly I think to get an account to leave a comment on my blog. Anyway it's already much better than mine, despite the lack of awesome video clips that make my site so entertaining.
OK I haven't posted anything in a while so sort of feel like I should. However, this is pretty much all going to be about basketball, so if that's not your thing, you might want to skip this. Otherwise, read on Paul . . .
BT Update
Tonight we played our third game of the season, and won by just four or five points. You know it's going to be a serious game when the other team plays man for 40 minutes straight, but it kind of worked out for us, as it forced us to go to the basket, instead of jacking up threes all night long. After tonight we're 3 - 0, although that doesn't really mean anything since we finished about 20 and 2 last year and then choked in the semi finals. Still, it's been fun the last season or two. The team seems like it's clicking most weeks, even though we're usually down at least one player a week (and have been without Wheelie since late last year). Having Ando's mate Dimi the last two games has helped a lot - with another big guy out there, it doesn't allow other teams to just focus on Ash, and means guys like me often get totally ignored by the defense.
To be honest though I think the competition has dropped a little bit - the team we played tonight were reallt good, but there seems to be a lot of mediocrity in the league. One postive is we seem to have lost some of the boneheaded teams - not sure if the guys from Coopers Troopers and Rydaz lost interest in basketball, or just went back to prison, but the league is better without them.
Anyway, the thing that's been really cool lately is that everyone has been contributing. Although we lose a lot of height when Ash goes to the bench, almost everyone else on the team is pretty interchangeable - someone different usually steps up every week.
Basketball on the world wide interweb
Back in the day the only website I used to really read for basketball commentary was slamonline. They changed it a while back from one long post a day from the editor Lang Whittaker to a whole lot of medium sized ones. For a while it dropped off, but now I think it's probably better than before. Lang doesn't write a whole lot anymore, but there are some other good writers on there - I alway like Russ Bengston's stuff, and Jake Appleman is pretty good too. Their new online editor Sam is growing on me too.
The next page that got added to my must read list was Bill Simmons' page on ESPN, and that's still the first thing I'll check out whenever I'm online. It's weird, there's this whole sub-community of people on the internet who thinks that Simmons sucks now, and spend a lot of their time talking about this. That to me seems incredibly depressing - not just spending your life online, but spending your life bitching about someone you've never met because you don't like their new stuff as much as their old stuff? They even have their own site, www.sonsofthesportsguy.com.
Anyway, I still love his writing, and I've actually enjoyed the increasing number of guest appearances from his wife over the past six months. Although her style is suspiciously similar to his, I'm not sure how much she's actually writing herself.
Lately I've started checking out quite a few basketball blogs, and there's quite a few good ones out there.
Truehoop is sort of similar to the old slamonline site, with links to a whole lot of stories with a bit of commentary. This has become part of my daiy rotation, I highly recommend.
Then there's some stuff that's a little weirder. Free Darko is sometimes good, sometimes average, and usually confusing. For some reason I keep coming back. Bethlehem Shoals is a unique writer, even if he does get a little deep sometimes for an NBA site.
Straight Bangin' isn't exclusively a basketball blog - the author also covers hip hop a lot - but there's some good stuff in there, and it's updated pretty regularly.
If you haven't seen it yet, here's the latest Nike basketball commercial.
It kind of reminds me of a skit that aired on the Chappelle Show where he pointed out how everyone looks cool walking in slow motion. Although I guess I play sport in slow motion and noone ever complimented me on that.
And finally, here's the commerical for the Jordan XXI, also known as the greatest commercial of all time.
Last night I went down to Marion with Mirjana to see Stranger Than Fiction. It was her choice, so I knew it could be really good (like the time she took me to watch Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang) or really bad (like any movie she's taken me to see with that weird little Tobet Maguire fella in it). Luckily this was pretty good.
We had an idea of what to expect when Mirjana told the girl at the candy bar what we were seeing, and she said "Well, it's different . . ." When Mirjana said "Different meaning good, right?" the girl replied "I guess, if you like that sort of stuff". I suppose that's why they have her working the candy bar and not the ticket sales window.
Anyway, the movie is about Harold Crick (played by Will Ferrell), an average guy with an average job who one day starts to hear a voice in his head narrating his every move. After meeting with a psychiatrist and a literary professor, he realises he's become a character in a book which is currently being written. The only problem is that the author (and narrator, played by Emma Thompson) is famous for killing off the protagonists in her books, and so he has to chase her down and convince her to let him live.
I read a review of this where it was compared to Being John Malkovich but to me it seemed closer to another Charlie Kaufman movie, Adaptation. In fact, the script would have seemed brilliant if it wasn't kind of done before in that movie.
I've never been a huge Will Ferrell fan. I loved Anchorman, but that's about the only one of his comedies I really like. I saw Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby a few weeks ago, and other than the following scene, came away a little disappointed.
Ferrell is really good in this though, kind of like when Jim Carrey did the Truman Show. Also worth mentioning is the always lovely Maggie Gyllenhall, who gives Ferrell a reason to fight for his life as an unlikely love interest.
Anyway, I would give this 7.5 out of 10. If you're interested, here's the trailer . . .
I'm really looking forward to this. Sure The Simpsons hasn't been quite as good the last few years, but there's still moments of brilliance. As long as expectations are kept in check, this should turn out to be OK.
The games varied in length from about 2 hours for the first one, till only 30 minutes or so for the last one. Not really sure what happened there but everyone was playing really loose.
I won the first game in a heads up with Ando, but then he came back and beat me in the same situation in games two and three - more than fair really since I kind of won on a fluke in game one.
We had an idea of what to expect when Mirjana told the girl at the candy bar what we were seeing, and she said "Well, it's different . . ." When Mirjana said "Different meaning good, right?" the girl replied "I guess, if you like that sort of stuff". I suppose that's why they have her working the candy bar and not the ticket sales window.
Anyway, I would give this 7.5 out of 10. If you're interested, here's the trailer . . .