Midnight Biker

I was coming home from a late dinner tonight and driving, I saw a guy on a bike, going pretty fast. He was wearing jeans and sneakers and t-shirt, no helmet or protection. He proceeded to ride in front of me, took a turn around my building and went to the playground they built for skating, biking and rollerblading. Picture the extreme competition type platforms.

As I was walking home from my car, I was listening to him do jumps and turns and flips...with no protection, in the middle of the night.

What drove him there? The midnight cool air. The lack of other kids. The feeling of being alone under the light with no one to watch. No one to watch him mess up. Yet no one to watch him do his best flip. Maybe he just had a fight with his friends and needs to be left alone. Maybe he's celebrating his new bike, or the start of summer break. Whatever he's doing, he can do that thing alone. I silently admire that. I have the same admiration for the 7 a.m. guy that I see in the gym, and the busy mom who ran for her appointment with me in her lunch break. Hats off to all these people for staying in touch with their bodies.

Gym Gems

Too bad that Guido and Luigi no longer exists as a comic strip. Neither does Unfit.
Those were very cool.

Little did I know that comic strip worthy people existed in the 24 hour gym that we go to, here in wonderful and crazy fit California.

I usually wear my headphones and don't hear much of what people say and while I have written about what some people do in the past, I have never heard what are best described as gym gems :)

Last night might as well have been a comic strip, featuring the following characters:

100 rep cable crunch PT

" Yeah man, I love this personal training job, before that I worked in a bar for a while, before that in real estate, but nothing is this good man, my client just lost 24 lbs in 3 weeks and I am like wow dude, the best next thing to this is being a doctor. Love the job, man..."

Formerly 236 lbs bodybuilder guy

"I lost so much weight last week, was very sick, couldn't eat man, so I am down to 225 lbs like a week later and everybody is saying man you look so huge...and I am like so much lighter. What's wrong with these guys?"

Manga hair wifebeater guy

" It's all about the protein, bro. You need to maintain your weight, this is at least 150 grams of protein and this is just to m-a-i-n-t-a-i-n. And alcohol dude, that stuff is catabolic. That means it eats your muscle, so if you drink it cancels all the muscle you made that week. And you must eat eggs, like egg whites and remove the yellows."

Spanish Diva

" So this is how you do this for your legs and they look great"

As she proceeds to do a romanian deadlift all wrong, even though her legs do look great.

I wish I could draw better :)

Buffet lunches, large waistlines and other jiggly thoughts...

This is a small dessert spoon. It's sitting on top of my coffee cup. The small dent in it is all I ate of that artificial tasting cube of jello, one of the desserts at a Sunday buffet. There wasn't really much choice, brownies, ice cream, strawberry mousse, muffins, apples and oranges.

There were all sorts of people at the buffet: families with macaroni and cheese eating kids, moms with lettuce laden plates, dads with two bowls of chili each...and then there were the really really large people next to our booth.

We were starved and exhausted from working out when we got there, so each of us got salad with plenty of cheese, soups with the most meat and some corn bread. We splurged on a piece of bread each, and I had two slices of orange for desert, while my partner had some ice cream. I did want to try the jello and you can tell how great it was from the picture of the leftover of my first and only serving of it. As I was trying to take that photo, I noticed that the girl from large couple sitting next to us was enjoying another serving of dessert, after ice cream. She was having 10 of these same jello things that I had just tried. They were the most nutritionally empty choice she could have made, given there were apples, ice cream and cottage cheese...so I wondered is it that people have no choice. I will admit that I love watching heavier people eat and shop because it gives me an insight into their choices and the power they have to choose what's good for them and what's not. This girl had already chosen a pink sugar drink, baked potato with chili and sour cream and cheese and now was digging into a second desert. Given the metabolic and mental complications most bigger people have to deal with, I can imagine those choices didn't help.

We can argue until tomorrow on the health and genetic origins of being heavier and having a hard time losing weight, but when you watch a couple engaging in the same behavior you can't ignore the strong relationship. Could we be the larger couple? Sure. We would just have to choose to not exercise and eat at much as we want at the buffets we go to. Oh, and I might need to learn to like jello.