112. All the excitement of the gym

Am starting to experience daily (upper) back pain, which I am going to have to put down to the cycling tosh (rather than weird sleeping positions. Or just generally exercise being bad for you).

So I headed off to the gym tonight to work my upper-back and arm muscles in a different way on the cross-trainer (and not just to avoid having to go for a run. Honest! Well, mostly honest...). Which was largely uneventful, as gym visits go.

Although, the gym remains busy. There is a new repeat-user of the cross-trainer on the block - a young man who is clearly hard of hearing because he has to wear HUGE headphones over his ears in order to listen to his tunes while training. He looks like he's wearing ear-muffs... Or like he has a not-so secret Mickey Mouse obsession... And so Mickey Mouse (M to his friends) has joined our little troupe of gym-goers. Welcome!

Also in attendance were Gym Club Barbie (looking more Gym Club than Barbie today with a sombre all-grey outfit going on, and more actual exercise than flitting and fluttering), and Mirror Bloke. Mirror Bloke was behaving rather oddly (Gym Club Barbie and I shared some disconcerted and worried looks over this). He was using the treadmill (I'll admit, quite ferociously) and every so often... Exclaiming. He was in a part of the gym that was particularly prone to echo and this added to the effect, but... He was either exhorting himself to additional speed or distance, or singing along for a couple of works to his tunes: but to those of us not in tune with him, he was basically just shouting incomprehensible gibberish every couple of minutes. Quite distracting, and possibly a little alarming.

Luckily, getting off the treadmill seemed to cure him of the urge to exclaim to the room at large (perhaps he had been vocally fending of the power of the Sith?). I left him and Gym Club Barbie wordlessly arguing over who got to do their floor exercises right in front of the mirror (Gym Club Barbie was winning by virtue of having flung herself to the ground first).

The good news is that my upper back is not hurting like it was before. The bad news is that it is hurting in a different way now. Pah! I now intend to ignore it until it stops malingering. That's bound to work...

:o)

Today's stats
Cross-trainer - 37 mins, 5 miles [Level 5]