After a lengthy absence therefrom, I have finally returned to the land of the work out.  You may applaud accordingly.

Physical fitness is one of those things that I know I should be more interested in than I actually am.  After all, who wouldn’t want to lick from head to toe look like young Marco Dapper here:

The problem I have with actually attaining this goal personally is that I happen to find spending time in large cavernous rooms that smell like old sweat in order to pick up heavy objects and put them down repeatedly one of the most stultifyingly dull activities imaginable.  It’s down there with doing my taxes (sorry, Matt).

I know that I have the “wrong attitude.”  Some of my gym rat friends have told me this repeatedly.  “Think of it as ‘you time,’” one has told me often.  “You’re taking time for yourself and not for anyone else.”  While this may be true, time I take for myself is more pleasurably spent doing many things other than putting myself in extreme physical discomfort so that afterwards I can shower in an open room with a bunch of extremely overweight unattractive men while trying not to let on that my arms are so sore that I can barely raise them high enough to wash my hair.

Yes, as you can see, I very much embody the wrong attitude.  I’ve tried the “workout partner” thing, too.  That lasted as long as it took for me to want to throw one of the heavy objects at said workout partner.  In addition to his numerous other psychological problems, the gent in question was one of those who, if I somehow managed to perform with more weight than he could, would stand back, analyze my form using those years of experience in physical training that he gained working on his doctorate in film studies, and declare, “I think you’re doing that wrong.”

For many years, I forced myself to the gym a few times a week, but I always run up against the same problem: I belong to the gym at work.  I carpool.  My carpool ride doesn’t go to the gym herself.  I also recognize that I am an early morning workout kind of person – if I leave it until later in the day, I will come up with every excuse imaginable not to go.

A couple of years ago, Ray acquired a WiiFit.  I was intrigued by the concept of the WiiFit.  It’s a workout that you can do at home!  Right?

Well, the WiiFit has a couple of problems, most of which are incorporated in the fact that you get to pick and choose your exercises.  There’s very little guidance, which means that if you happen to not like doing a particular activity, you can just not do it.

The WiiFit also has the slightest of attitude problems.  When I started to lag behind, I recognized perfectly well that one of the reasons that I was avoiding it had to do with not wanting to sit through the scolding it was likely to give me when I came back.

So, last week, Ray announced that he wanted to get the newest home work out program for the Wii – EA Active, it’s called.

And here’s what I’m going to say about it: it’s kicking my ass.  And I kind of like it.  It makes up for the shortcomings of WiiFit — there’s a personal trainer (“30 day challenge”) that makes you do exercises that you don’t want to (I fucking HATE lunges).  It also rotates them so that you’re not doing the same thing every day — this was something I never quite managed myself with WiiFit.  Best of all, I can do it in the morning before I leave for work — I have to get up a little earlier, but I feel like I’m actually accomplishing something besides doing yoga poses in my underwear.

While it incorporates the Wii Balance Board (what she’s standing on in the cartoon), it’s a little weird about it.  WiiFit used the balance board to take your weight and calculate body mass – EA Action wants you to input your weight manually.  For the past few days, I was convinced that the settings had slipped somehow because I wasn’t using the balance board at all, but today it was back.  And I kind of wished it weren’t.

Probably the biggest annoyance is that I’ve had to hold poses for a really long time before realizing that the problem is that I’m holding the Wii Remote and Nunchuk incorrectly, so the machine isn’t registering that I’ve done the set.  I’m not sure whether that’s an annoyance with me or with the system.

But at any rate, I’m through my first full week of the 30 day challenge, and it’s actually bringing me back.  That’s new.  And different.  And I kind of like it