Quite unexpectedly, I went to a gym yesterday.

My plan had been to take a nice long walk in the afternoon while my DH took my DSS to an indoor rock-climbing place. As I was getting into the shower my DH told me that the rock-climbing place had a gym too. Did I want to go with them and use the gym there?

Now, to put things in perspective, I haven’t set foot in a gym for over a year. My over-enthusiasm to get in shape for my wedding last year had me pushing myself very hard at the gym and something I did aggravated a herniated disk I already had - and I ended up with severe, debilitating sciatica that had me out of work for months, on tons of narcotic pain-killers, in surgery, and canceling our honeymoon. Not to mention that gyms in Paris are always dingy and smelly and old and ugly and dirty too.

I wasn’t missing the gym here, but I do miss feeling good and I know exercise needs to be part of my life. Getting back into the gym habit is something I’ve been thinking about for a while now, and while I haven’t moved to action I’m aware it’s a question of When, not If.

So I took the opportunity to go w my DH to this new-to-me location. Clearly it’s a climbing center, but they do have a lot of weight machines (forbidden to me since my back surgery) and a few rickety and very dirty cardio machines.

I’ve always felt the hardest part of the gym experience is getting there, and this was no exception. Once there I made the rounds of the machines, got on a treadmill, then took a few minutes on a stepper, back to the treadmill for a long walk at a reasonably rapid pace (faster than I walk when I walk for fitness around town for sure!) and played with moving the incline up and down every few minutes. I ended w 10 minutes on a bike. In all, I did one hour of exercise and was sweating (in part due to the lack of air conditioning, but it was also the most serious exercise session I’ve had in a LONG time).

I am very proud of myself for going. It was good to be w the family doing an active outing (even if I didn’t do the rock-climbing with them). It also really got me thinking about how to get more of the sweat-type of exercise into my life - either my DVD, my dust collector elliptical machine, or biting the bullet and going back to gym membership.