Update: The group \u201cOne Dozen Strong for Jacques Cousteau for President\u201d now has 16 members! Nothing can stop us now, except Mr. Cousteau\u2019s continued French deadness.<\/p>\n
Primary elections here yesterday \u2013 my friend Mark Walker lost his race for state treasurer, which is really too bad, as his opponent went out of his way to smear him and it worked. The more earth-shattering news is that Jason Chaffetz unseated six-term congressman Chris Cannon, one of the good guys in Congress who didn\u2019t deserve to be ousted. I don\u2019t think this bodes well for Utah or the nation at large.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t want to talk politics anymore. Too depressing.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve lost over twelve pounds these past two months as a result of diet and exercise \u2013 WAY too much exercise \u2013 and I\u2019m close to my personal goal of having my chest stick out further than my gut. That\u2019s never been the case at any time in my life, due largely to the fact that even when my gut was relatively tiny, my pecs were even tinier. So I\u2019m currently in the best physical I\u2019ve ever been in, which is really, really sad, if you think about it for too long.<\/p>\n
My wife teased me about how much I would moan and complain after my personal training sessions, which involve five minutes of one-minute exercises and then a single minute of rest. This sequence consists of a circuit, and the goal is to complete five circuits per session. Each rest minute goes by at lightning speed, whereas each exercise minute lasts about fourteen years. So Mrs. Cornell took to calling me \u201cRest Boy,\u201d because she\u2019s a tough physical therapist who doesn\u2019t put up with crap from her patients. I learned this firsthand when I broke my arm about six years ago, and she, as my own personal therapist nursing me back to health, dubbed me the whiniest patient she\u2019s ever had.<\/p>\n
Then she came with me to one of the classes.<\/p>\n
This is a great thing, because on the rare occasions that someone else is in the class, it means the trainer can\u2019t focus entirely on me. As such, I can slack off occasionally when he\u2019s not looking. It was also great because she was forced to concede that the exercises were quite brutal, and even though she\u2019s in much better shape than I am, it was quite a workout for her, too.<\/p>\n
Bottom line: she doesn\u2019t call me \u201cRest Boy\u201d anymore. Although she probably will after she reads this post.<\/p>\n
The hardest exercises are the ones that don\u2019t require repetition, just sheer endurance. Squats and curls and all the aerobic stuff can vary in intensity, but that\u2019s not true with, say, a wall sit, where you\u2019re forced to bend your knees with your back to the wall and put your hand in the air, holding that position for what feels like an eternal sixty seconds. We\u2019ve taken to punishing our kids with wall sits, and initial results are encouraging thus far.<\/p>\n
Or planking. Planking sucks, man. That\u2019s when you get down on your elbows and hold your body still, like a plank, for one of the longest minutes of your life. Side planks, where you do the same thing, only on your side, are just as awful.<\/p>\n
The Superman may be the worst of all, though. You lie on your stomach and strike a \u201cSuperman\u201d pose, lifting your arms and legs above the ground as if you\u2019re flying. But trust me, you\u2019re not \u2013 gravity becomes a major, major issue.<\/p>\n
This morning\u2019s exercises were especially wicked because I was up twice with three-year-old Stalliondo, who had severe diarrhea in the middle of the night. I shouldn\u2019t complain \u2013 his nocturnal crapping saved our lives on a fiery Christmas night<\/a> \u2013 but it put me in a crankier mood than I normally am when I\u2019m Supermanning.<\/p>\n This is the best time of the week, though. To paraphrase Homer Simpson, it\u2019s the longest time before more exercise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Update:The group \u201cOne Dozen Strong for Jacques Cousteau for President\u201d now has 16 members! Nothing can stop us now, except Mr. Cousteau\u2019s continued French deadness. Primary elections here yesterday \u2013 my friend Mark Walker lost his race for state treasurer, which is really too bad, as his opponent went out of his way to smear ... Read more<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=236"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}