Thanksgiving and Decisions

Thanksgiving came and went with no great fanfare. The food was tasty as always. The group was very small, just the folks that live here plus my kid. We ate on TV trays in the living room and watched Survivor, then Chopped and finally Below Deck Med.

I made some pecan pie brownies that took forever and turned out not so great. The recipe called for what I thought was a ridiculous amount of sugar, so I cut it way down. As it happens, all that sugar was quite necessary for texture and flavor. I could remake it the way it was intended, but I think I’ll pass. If a recipe is that reliant on sugar to be palatable, it’s not the recipe for me.

The writing project I am doing with my BFF keeps insisting that I write first thing in the morning. This is not ideal for me, the way my routine is currently set up, but I decided to try it anyway. Being half awake didn’t unlock any secret insights, if anything, what I wrote was more meandering and banal than usual. It did, however, interfere with my morning stretches which is a habit I worked hard to establish and do not want to put at risk. I’ve decided that I will write when I can make the time throughout the day, probably still in the morning, just not first thing.

I did a driveway workout with my neighbor yesterday for the first time since August. This was fun but also helped me make a decision. I started going to F45 once a week a few weeks back either as a guest of a friend or on a free trial. Ultimately, they coerced me into signing up. The only day that I can really go is a day that is always resistance themed. I do lots of resistance work with Ralph, so this is not complimentary to my training the way the Pilates is. If anything, it sets me up to perform worse. What I need is a low/no weight HIIT style circuit to get my heart rate up and/or mobility work. The workout I did in my driveway was so much better than any of the ones I have done at F45 and I am not in danger of hurting myself.

I’m lucky that I’m trained on proper form because had I not been, I would have been in trouble at F45. There are 10+ people working in the room with 1-2 ‘trainers’. The participants are doing squats and deadlifts and lunges under load, and trying to do them fast because the intervals are 30-45 seconds. It’s a recipe for disaster. Furthermore, when I watch the ‘trainers’ demo the exercises at the beginning, they often are confused about how it should be done because they are just regurgitating a video from corporate. This results in bad instruction. This is made worse when you have a trainer that really just wants attention, so they whip through the demo too fast and all wrong just so we can all marvel at how strong she is (she’s not). The stations have piles of weights that go from lightest to heaviest, but there aren’t duplicates, so if you were going for fifteen pounds and someone else grabs them, you either go lower and get nothing out of the exercise or jump to twenty pounds. That’s a big jump. I’m sure there is a stash of additional weights somewhere, but again, you have 30-45 seconds to work and if you’re fiddling around changing plates or whatever, you’re not doing the exercise. It is poorly conceived.

All this is to say that I’m going to cancel the F45 and just make my own workout for that extra day.