Monday, November 29, 2010

quarter-centennial

I am now 25 years old... yeesh.

What has happened in the last few days? Well, I had work Wednesday but I left just before lunch because I was tired of being there. Instead of staying, I took a half-day vacation to precede our holiday break. It turned out to be a good choice, as the extra half day felt like a whole day and made my break feel much longer.

Thursday was Thanksgiving, and I drove to my cousin's new house in San Antonio to spend time with the family. His new house is nice, and I had a good time there. We ate a lot of food, and cake in celebration of my birthday. Football did not go well, however, as the Cowboys and Longhorns both lost stupid games.

Friday was my birthday, and it was pretty eventful. We jammed for a couple hours earlier in the afternoon, and then people started coming over for our "friends" version of Thanksgiving (since we were all busy with family on Thursday). We played some touch football outside for maybe 30 minutes worth, but I still had a good hour in me. I really like playing football. Unfortunately, other people didn't share my enthusiasm, so we went back inside. The food was all delicious, with people bringing various things, and the remainder of the night was filled with games, chatting, and drinking.

On Saturday, Taylor came back so we spent most of the day hanging out. We watched Social Network and caught up on our various TV shows. It was a nice, relaxing day.

I was in the mood to be out and about Sunday, so we went to Fry's, Academy, and the mall. I didn't end up getting anything from Fry's, but I found some "cheap" 30lb adjustable dumbbells at Academy, so I bought two ($50 each). $100 might sound expensive for two dumbbells, but it's actually a decent deal. They're adjustable, so that means that with a slider I can adjust each dumbbell from 5-30lbs in 2.5 lb increments. That means I don't take up a bunch of space with many different dumbbells. Furthermore, if you were to buy individual dumbbells, they cost on average about $1/lb. That means if I wanted to buy a pair of 15's, 20's, 25's, and 30's, that would cost 15+15+20+20+25+25+30+30 = 180 dollars. So I'm saving money and space! They are far from great quality, but they're good enough quality to get the job done. Similar dumbbells are on sale on Amazon for $150-300!

This dumbbell purchase is obviously for P90X. I don't remember if I mentioned before, but the dumbbells and weights I pulled from Travis's storage unit aren't going to get the job done. They're adjustable, but in the manual sense. You have to unscrew the clamps on each side, pull the plates, put new plates on, then screw the clamps back on — for both. Adding 1 minute in between many 30 second routines in P90X is aggravating and slows you down considerably.

At any rate, P90X is still ongoing and I haven't given up yet. I am on day 10 today, and so far I have no desire to quit. It's hard, but not too hard. It's challenging, but not too challenging. Dare I say I'm already seeing some improvement? I've started week 2, and my results have increased from week 1. That's not all that surprising, however. When you first start something like this, I expect that you would see gains pretty easily at first, but the trick is to keep improving without plateauing. We'll see where I am on day 91 when I do my fit test again!