Best Summer Ever Week 8: Twenty Five

Ah crap, I’m old… at least I had another hilarious year in Minneapolis.

I turned 25 yesterday. My birthday fell on a Saturday this year, but the celebrations were muted because we just had two holiday weekends (July 4th and Minneapolis Gay Pride). I just felt like staying in, eating cheeseburgers and watching the First 48, but of course that didn’t happen.

We skipped around town to bars, restaurants and dog parks. Mojitos and dog poop characterized the weekend. Oh, and we saw Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho at a midnight showing. So it was mojitos, dog poop, and old-school slashers. Classy.
It wasn’t a bad way to end my first quarter-century on the planet. I looked over last year’s birthday goals and I achieved about half of them, namely graduating law school and getting a full time gig at my corporation.
I wasn’t so good about the exercise and creative goals. Actually, I put my personal training at LA Fitness on hold this week. The 5 a.m. workout schedule wasn’t working for me and I got annoyed by how often the gym did not open on time. My trainer was late too often as well. If I pay $500 a month for a service then I should not be standing outside a locked gym at 5 a.m. feeling like an idiot or inside the gym wondering where the hell my trainer is.

Going to the gym in the afternoon wasn’t an option because there are bizarre middle aged men who scream as they lift 40-pound weights. There is also a gooey layer of sweat that covers half of the machines/benches my trainer directs me to and random dumbbells littering the floor.

I couldn’t deal with that hot mess so I went to cancel my training and my membership, but LA Fitness wanted to charge me $2,500 to get out of my contract. I could not use their underwhelming services as a justification to cancel because the contract basically says that they will provide “personal training” without any promise regarding the quality of their services.

I should get approved to work from home in the coming months, so I’ll resume my personal training at a suburban LA Fitness on my work-from-home days. I’m too disgusted with the Uptown location to go back to that gym. I told the managers that too. The managers seem pretty on top of things when they are at the gym, but they obviously had no idea how poorly things are run when the gym opens at 5 a.m.

We’ll see how I do on my own the next few months. I gained 10-pounds during my first month of personal training and it wasn’t muscle. It was mostly because I didn’t sleep enough and being exhausted makes me ravenous. I’m sleeping more now and hopefully getting back down to my pre-gym weight. I don’t want to be 26 and chunky, so this is the year to get things together.