"I feel faint! The whole world is spinning!" "Why, that's lucky for us, Nancy. If it were flat, all

[captainsblog]

More sore than faint, but ol' Nick Danger had nothing on my further adventures last night.

The BigAss Gym where I do cardio is making a decent effort to get people interested in their classes.  They scheduled a series of short intro sessions, where "everybody's new- don't worry!" and they'd gently explain their methods and their implements of torture in about half an hour.

Most of these are chick pits, not that there's anything girlygirl about what they're doing. I've seen one where they're slinging what must be at least 30-pound barbells, while jumping on and off steppers, all perfectly choreographed. In the first half hour of that, I'd be in the ER with bets being taken on how many body parts I'd broken.

Buttz and Gutz? Nah. Yoga? I'd destroy all the karma in the room when they saw me there without sneaks on. But spinning? Maybe. Fourish years and 40 pounds ago, when I first signed up with the previous B.A.G., the trainer wrote "Try spinning class!" on my chart. Eleanor laughed almost as hard as I did at that one. I'm not a class-warfare guy, much less with a Latin beat going. Give me my elliptical, my iPod and my book and I burn it.

Except sometimes it drags, especially if I don't like the book or the music that day. So, all this time later, I got my ass in gear for the no-obligation trial.

And,.... I'm still stuck on "maybe."  Three hand positions, 24 gears, occasional climbs and jumps, and nothing overly macho- RPM goals I beat on the elliptical without breaking a sweat. Also, a sane sense of "if you can't do it, just spin at whatever, nobody cares" that I could live with.  Their classes are mostly ass o'clock in the morning, which I don't see happening, but there's one evening one, on a night I don't have my other weight classes, and not far from when I'm often there anyway. Two of the trainers run all of them- the guy who did last night's, and someone I think I've seen in passing, named Marcie.

I'll probably be okay with either of them, as long as she doesn't try calling me "Sir."

----

So, yeah, sore from that still, a little, but not as sore as the poor one under the desk right now.

Ebony's gone lame in one leg again. Right before I left last night, she turned down her noms, which is unusual, but she's the least chow-y of all the chow hounds in this house, and she'd seemed okay otherwise, both before that and as I was leaving.  When I got home, Eleanor was on the floor next to her, massaging the leg and doing major Nightingaling on the poor pup.  I took over for a bit, and after some medicine and some icing, she was walking again on it- if gingerly- by the end of the night. Still, she wasn't herself, so I held down the sofa next to where she was resting until I was sure she wasn't unable to sleep.

This morning, she ate- though not as much (the pain med's a killer on the stomach)- and she's not going to be dancing the tarantella anytime soon, but I think it's a storm, like others like it, that she'll weather. We'll weather.