What is this elliptical machine you speak of?

After a very long hiatus (probably in the neighborhood of a year, no joke), I stumbled upon a long lost friend today in the gym, the elliptical machine. 

While some people may prefer the ellipiticals with moving arms

or the arc trainer

I prefer the good old Precor EFX 546:

While I’m sure the very first model I worked out at in my college’s sad-excuse for a gym, which by the way is now awesome:

was not the 546 (which is Precor’s commercial model) little has changed on this machine, which is what I love about it! I can get on it 6 years later and still get the same great workout. Today, I choose the interval workout and did 30 minutes.

So why did I choose the elliptical today instead of swimming or my beloved running? Well, swimming was on the schedule for today, and to be frank, I’m just not ready to get back in the pool. Out of the three triathlon sports, swimming is definitely my least favorite. In fact if I had to rank swimming, biking and running each out of 100 for how much I enjoy them my rankings would look like this:

• Running: 90
• Biking: 95 (more like 50 if indoors though)
• Swimming: 2 (maybe 3 on a good day)

So as you can see I just do not like swimming. It’s probably because I have not mastered the art of swimming. In all three of my triathlons I have swam primarily breast stroke because I swim breast stroke and freestyle at the same speed. Now I know this means my breast stroke is good and my freestyle is atrocious and it means I need to spend time working on freestyle. In fact, I probably need to spend more time in the pool than anything else. All that aside, I just don’t want to. It really doesn’t help right now that I’m trying to get my self focused on losing weight and I feel that swimming isn’t as good of a workout (because I don’t spend as much time doing it per workout as I do when I run or bike). I will eventually get back in the pool, but I’m thinking it won’t be until after January 1st when I need to be more focused on the triathlons ahead of me.

And why no run? Because tomorrow I’m running the Drumstick Dash and knew that I shouldn’t run today so that I could be ready for that. 

Overall, the elliptical was a nice alternative that I don’t get to enjoy often enough. I loved that I was able to read blogs (on my iPhone) and watch the news (which was actually crazy because I saw a car that looked just like M’s pulled off to the side of the interstate at around 6:47, just about the time M would be going through that part of the interstate on the way to his workout. I thought no that’s not his car because he doesn’t have a sunroof, even though the car looked identical. Well about 10 minutes after getting to work, M emailed me and said he had gotten in a minor fender bender. I told him what I saw on the news and he said it probably was him (and he does have a sunroof)! — crazy stuff!).

After the lovely elliptical, I did exercise 1B from NROLW. The lunges are the exercise I naturally hate in the 1B workout, but I can survive. The one thing I don’t understand about 1B is that the ab exercise is crunches on a stability bar. You are supposed to start with 2 sets of 8. That’s too little for me. Today I did 2 sets of 25. I will eventually hold weights up while I do this to make it more difficult.