Joining Rice Rec Center

I will miss my trainer - Frank - at the Fast Results Fitness center down the road, but this is a recession.  There's no way I can rationalize shelling out from $65 to $85 per 1-hr session for a Personal Trainer, compared with $25 per month to join the Rice University Rec Center, with its superb range of equipment and facilities.  And should I need more help with training, a package of 20 sessions goes for $800, i.e. $40 a pop. Sounds more like it.

So as from tomorrow, it is goodbye FRT, hallo Rice.  Big advantage to being a Rice employee spouse.  Of course it is a longer trip to get there and back, but Kathleen and I are planning to work some gym time into our weekly running schedule on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when we run in the midtown and Heights area.  I guess we will see how it works out.  It might be fun to run out there on the weekend as well.  Maybe stop at Jenni's Noodle House on the way back...

Looking back on my 96 PT sessions (starting in December last year) with several personal trainers, I think the overall program was a qualified success.  I'm far from buff, but not a sack of potatoes either.  If it weren't for the 20 pounds or so of excess blubber around my middle (mostly) I might actually be able to locate my long lost abs.  As I wrote in an earlier posting, they were last seen around 1978.  Barring some major change of course, I fear they may never be found,  gone forever like gas at a dollar.

Of course hope is central to the human condition.  Were it not for hope, and the seemingly inextinguishable belief we all hold that tomorrow is going to be better than today, it would be very tough to face adversity and the daily blows we take to our psyche and our physical selves.  So yes, even well into my middle years (pun definitely not intended) I still believe that those pesky itinerant abs are going to see the light of day again.  They are there, just waiting to be re-discovered like a species once thought to be extinct.  No need for an expedition into the Amazon to find them either.  Just some will-power, and several more miles per week running (knee permitting) should do the trick.