P80X?

Stephen and I are on day eighty-something of P90X. I've done chest and back, yoga, plyometrics, legs and back, ab ripper X, and core synergistics. I've lost inches (just a pound or two). I look fit. I'm stronger. I can run farther. This workout has made a tremendous difference.

I hate P90X.

It's not that it's a bad workout. Quiet the contrary. It's really good. But even though the system is based on muscle confusion, ninety days of doing the same series of workouts becomes the same old routine after a while. I can't deal with that. Change is good for me. I need a change.

Today during the chest, shoulder, triceps workout, I stopped about halfway through and thought, If I have to do one more set of pushups, I'm going to scream. And then Tony Horton's voice began to grate on me like a whining kid in a fancy restaurant.



I no longer want to get Xed. I can go the rest of my life without crossing my arms in front of me.

So what I can say on this Thanksgiving Eve is that I am thankful that Stephen recently built an Anytime Fitness center close to our house. In the next week or two, it'll be open, and then I can go there and work out on some machines again. I can do some more aerobics. I can work out on an elliptical machine. After doing that for a while, I'm sure I'll come back to some P90X workouts here and there, but I won't make them my only fitness program. I have to mix it up a bit.

Maybe I'll start training for a 5K...

Here is Your Lanyard

I have been remiss at my blogging. I know my thousands of readers are in withdrawal, not knowing what the Remler boys have been doing or what frocks I have whipped up by hand out of old bed sheets. But November is here, and while most folks associate the month with elections and Thanksgiving, I also associate it with advisement and pre-registration, Regents' test grading, and my students' frequent office visits due to their realizations, after failing three essays, that they're probably not going to pass English 101. I'll be back to the blog by December 1st, I'm sure. But until then, I hope you will enjoy this reading from my favorite poet, Billy Collins: