Old Friends in the Garage

It was a bright sunny day but everyone in my household was too busy to help me take the pups to the park. My son had an online class lecture and a lot of assignments posted. My husband is mostly working from home. I went into the garage to uncover the buried elliptical we bought several years ago. It hasn't been used in such a long time that I had to brush cobwebs off the screen!

I flicked the power switch and it started right up. The glide is not as effortless as the Precors at my gym, but at least this is accessible. The Vision S7100 is meant for residential use. I pedal for 5 minutes, trying to get a feel for the machine again. I'm breathing hard but it's cold enough that I'm not going to break a sweat. The garage isn't insulated. We bought the elliptical as a replacement for the treadmill my husband used to pound, figuring this way we could both use it. My knees are a tad achy from the resistance (it's supposed to be zero but that's not true), but at least there's no clunk. If I bring my iPod and headphones, this won't be too terrible. I spend the next 2 hours moving and rearranging all manner of plastic totes and bins until I can access the pull-up bar attached to the far wall, and some of the free weights.

Somehow the Olympic bar on the garage floor feels heavier than the ones at the gym. We have an EZ Curl bar as well, and a few Dan Lurie cast iron weights on a plate tree. But I don't have an Oly bench anymore. My husband's old Bowflex is piled high with camping gear. I free up a shaky adjustable bench with ankle cushions. I guess I can do Rip Skulls. The EZ bar should be about 30 lbs. There's also two sets of those oddly square Powerblock DBs which are too big and unwieldy for me to use. We do have a few smaller cast iron DBs lying about. And I'm not sure about doing pushups on the concrete garage floor. Stretching isn't going to happen either: too many spiders and mice!


The gym sent an email inviting member to use an online digital personal training app called AMP. I logged in out of curiosity but so far haven't been able to access anything useful. It normally costs around $9 monthly but we're all still paying our gym memberships for a facility we can't use so this app and its services are supposed to be free. We'll see how useful this is or not...