When I moved to NY I had to give up most of my exercise equipment – there simply isn’t enough space in my cottage for the array of equipment I had in my basement in Maine. I kept my weight bench and stored it here in NY, but everything else went. Tearing a muscle in my abdomen kept me from exercising for all of September and October, and it’s only now that I’ve felt good enough to workout again. But what to do for a workout? It’s gotten too chilly (and dark) to run, and too cold out in the barn to lift weights.

I’ve mentioned in the past my minor interest in exercise equipment hooked up to videogame machines. Along those lines, I went out and bought a Dance Dance Revolution dance pad, and I’ve been dancing away in the evenings. It’s a surprisingly effective cardiovascular workout. I have to constantly remind myself of this fact when I’m working out since I feel like a complete ass doing it. But what can you do – it’s actually superior to using an exercise bike, though a bit harder on the knees and ankles. And the equipment stows neatly away behind the shelving in my office. My only complaint aside from the embarrassment factor is that mostly the music that comes with the games is just plain bad, there are no tracks on the cd’s I have that I would actually listen to if I weren’t playing this game. I’ve also discovered that true to the stereotype, I have no rhythm. It does feel great to be working out again though. It’s depressing how quickly my hard earned physique has faded – I used to rattle off 75-100 crunches a night and could do 3 sets of 30 pushups easily. 2.5 months off and I can barely do 2 sets of 15 crunches and 2 sets of 20 pushups. That’s the bad news, the good news is I know what it will take to get me back to where I was, and I know I’ll have no problem doing it, it will just take some time.