The Gym

I had a gym membership once. I had it for a whole summer. My grandma, Nanny, added me to her Fitness Club membership in Santa Rosa the summer after my first year of college. I had a job as an activities director/dining room host at an assisted living center and was off every day around 5. We got quite a little routine down, actually. We would meet at the gym after I got off work and she would swim, walk, or sit in the sauna while I experimented with all of the different (and very strange looking) machines spread throughout the facilities. Then we would shower and spend the rest of the evening sitting in Starbucks sipping on our respective coffee beverages. Tall vanilla latte for me and a decaf coffee in THIS cup with THAT much coffee and THAT much hot water with THIS much extra room at the top for cream (she had the places marked on her cup in sharpie). She would open her paper, I'd bury my nose in a book and we would stay until they kicked us out. This was often about a half hour after closing though because Nanny was friends with all the baristas. If she didn't bring them a bag of fresh apples off of her tree, they would send her home with a whole coffee cake. This is really one of the reasons I believe my late night/Starbucks coffee/Coffee shop addiction is genetic...

But anyway, back to the gym.

I loved that summer of gym membership, loved my years in Cross Country and although I have never LOOKED particularly toned or "in shape" I love the feeling of being healthy and fit. So now that I have a relatively normal schedule and a few gyms scattered throughout my area I am dreaming up workout routines and scouring the web for good smoothie recipes and dying to try a yoga class. Imagine my joy then, upon finding out that at my office there is an entire gym already furnished with all of those strange looking machines and mats and even a tv and speaker system hooked up to a DVD player! Not only that, my boss is dying to bring in a yoga instructor once or twice a month during lunch and there are even newly remodeled shower facilities upstairs. Not that our facilities are as sweet as the Google complex or anything but hey, I am not complaining.

The plan? Try out the office gym and if I get too sick of being in that building I will begin to look into gym memberships but for now, you just can't beat free.