My workout regimen is a nightly two hour long cardiovascular adventure.

I start the first hour on the treadmill and over time I have increased the angle on the treadmill deck progressively all the way up to where I now use it, at five degrees of inclination. I set the speed at 3.8 miles per hour, which is enough to get my heart pumping but not enough to take my breath away. I read once that if you were going to use walking as an exercise that if you are short of breath or breathing so that you cannot maintain a conversation well, that you are exercising beyond your capacity for maximum cardiovascular benefit. At some point walking has to drop away and give up to running. I was doing some running on a Nike+ program but when I started to run into joint aching that was a pretty clear signal to me that perhaps I need to stretch out my expectations of running, at least in the short-term. This time on the treadmill, at least by the computer in the treadmill declares that I burn around 745 calories for the entire hour.

The second hour I spend on the Elliptical Trainer. This machine replicates the general motion of cross-country skiing mixed with stair-climbing and walking. I set the time to be an hour and the “difficulty” to 14 out of 20. I don’t really know what the units are for the Elliptical trainer when it comes to its “difficulty” and I think that each machine manufacturer has it’s own concept of this. When I finish with this exercise I’ve burned about 845 calories.

I do this every single night, except on Sunday. That’s the day I select to rest and recover. So far it’s working very well for me. I do have some mildly entertaining problems, first of which is that I sweat a LOT. Even when I wear UnderArmour, which is supposed to wick sweat away. I find myself soaking my entire kit to saturation and then the sweat starts to rain off of me. It’s not just a little either, not a pitterpat, but more along the lines of a light rainstorm. I try to keep from swinging my hands too much so I don’t accidentally splatter nearby people who really would rather not take a shower from me. The sweat gets going on the treadmill but goes out of control on the Elliptical machine. It runs down my face and into my eyes and stings. So I’ve altered my kit and now I have a towel with me. I mop myself up every two or three minutes and by the end I’m wringing what I imagine to be about 300 to 500 milliliters of water out of myself. They say Cancer is a water sign, of this I have no doubt. Along with my issues with water, it’s getting colder outside. No longer can I work out, then dash outside to hop in my car. I did that once, and when the 40 degree air hit me it took my breath away. Evaporation consumes a lot of energy, in moments I was shivering. Now I take my time, change, wear more seasonally appropriate coverings so the short jaunt outside to my car isn’t so breathtaking.

What has it done for me personally? Well, I’ve lost a lot of weight. I started this adventure at 280 pounds, and I was wobbling around there and 278, back and forth. Mostly that was my sedentary lifestyle expressed in my weight. At this point I was hypertensive and really on the road to later disaster and I knew it. Now I weigh in at 242.6. I have lost 37.4 pounds. It’s interesting to see where it loses first. The first zones that showed immediate and surprising (almost shocking) improvement were in my legs. I used to have what I affectionately described as thunder-thighs, because I keep a lot of my weight there. That has since started to drop away. The next place was my ass, which as pretty much disappeared. Then I started to notice the drop in my face and neck, and oddly enough, my wrists and arms. The most resistant area for weight loss is the obvious regions, right along my trunk and back. So I still have a belly and love-handles, although the further I go the more I am noticing that I’m starting to develop an actual body-shape that is in line with my overall goals. I’m never ever going to look like the other gym bunnies, and I’m okay with that, but I am tired of being fat, and that fat made me tired. In a way I’m tired of being tired. That leads into the next expected-but-still-a-surprise personal result for me, my energy level has shot way up. All this exercise has also done wonders for my mood. When I carried all the weight I was always tired and irritable and generally a moody bitch. Now that I’ve shed a lot of that, I find myself not so quick in the grouchiness arena. Exercise physiologists say that regular exercise has benefits for mental health in addition to what it does for the body and of that I believe them. Body image is very important to me and it struck me square between the eyes a few days ago. I was about to head into the gym and I was wearing too much bulk, so it wasn’t terribly cold and so I stripped down to my UnderArmour Heat Gear Tee. Almost always I want to put something else on over that because I’m self-conscious about how I look with such form-fitting clothing on but that day I tossed off the layers and didn’t give it a single thought. When I got half-way to the changing rooms at my gym and noticed that I just had on my heatgear tee, and that I was okay with that, that feeling was like a blossoming reward for all the hard work I had been doing. It’s only going to get better, and I have another 42.6 pounds to lose. When I get to 200, then I’ll be just right where I want to be.

Working out this way is exceptionally dull work. I get out of work at 5, get to the gym around 5:30, and I really don’t get started on the machines until 6pm. Two hours of working out push my days to 8pm before I can even think of going home. While I’m working out I found that mental diversions really help. Listening to Podcasts works okay, but often times I get transfixed by the timer on the machine and then it just drags on and on. Reading on my Nook Simple Touch is better, especially when I can make the text very large. I sweat too much, and so the Nook has fallen out of favor in this use because I don’t want to drown it in sweat and short it out and kill it. What works best to keep my mind occupied while my body chugs away is my iPad. I’ve found that Flipboard, DC Comics app, Uno, Bejeweled 2, and Qrank really work well to keep me entertained so the time just flies on by. When I’m working out at the Anytime Fitness in Kalamazoo, they offer free Wifi so it’s great and very easy. When I’m at the Anytime Fitness in Portage, they don’t offer free Wifi, so I have to create my own Wifi through my iPhone. It’s not too bad, but I do wish I could get Wifi down in Portage as well.

When I began this new regimen I started out dreading my afternoons, schlepping off to the gym and huffing and puffing and sweating like a rainstorm. Now I think I might be getting addicted to working out. It’s not that I really like it, but it’s an odd sort of craving I have now. It’s good for me and is one of the reasons why I’m dropping weight so very quickly and I really don’t have a problem with that. I just wish I had more hours in the day to do the other things in my life. But if trading some fun for what I’ve been able to do for and to myself over these past few months is very much worth it.