Mountain Mayhem

In the midst of all our adoption excitement, I've been shipped off for a week to beautiful Louisville, Colorado. Louisville is a suburb of Denver, approximately midway between Denver and Boulder. It was 65 degrees here today, so I can't complain about the weather, but it still stinks to be away from home.

While away on business, I try to maintain some semblence of a normal dietary and exercising life. This isn't always an easy thing to accomplish. Let me give you some details of my day to explain the dilema. This morning, I stumbled jetlagged into the lobby of the hotel to partake in the bane of any dieter's existence -- the buffet breakfast. Now I'm a complete sucker for those Golden Malted waffles that you pour into the iron then flip over then wander away to get orange juice then wander over to look at the egg offerings then wander over to look at the cereal and fruit then simultaneously hear the beeping of the waffle iron (which has now been beeping for several minutes) in harmony with the beeping of the smoke alarm signaling that your Golden Malted is now Golden Charred. In any case, I had a waffle for breakfast, using a carefully measured amount of syrup to try and not totally kill my diet. Then off to work. (Take note that my traveling companions each ate a half dozen eggs plus a whole hog's worth of bacon...mmmm...bacon....)

At noon, my two teammates wanted to get Mexican food, so we went to a local establishment called "The Three Margaritas." My cohorts each ordered the "Mucho Burrito" which looked like it probably had "Mucho Million Calories." I, again in an effort to not gain 50 pounds on one trip, ordered a relatively healthy taco salad. I'm not shooting for the figure of an Olympic gymnast here, just to not gain weight.

For dinner, we trapsed up to Boulder for Italian at Pasta Jay's. I've eaten at Jay's three or four times now, and every time it has been wonderful. Tonight I had a linguini and shrimp in a cream sauce. Oh, and I had a pint of Fat Tire Ale. Now I'm fully aware that this meal is not going to garner me a call from Jenny Craig looking for a spokesman, but I was tired, stuck with two engineers for a week, in ski country with no chance of skiing. So I raise my glass of Fat Tire.

We got back to the hotel around 7:30pm, and I decided that to makeup for the sins of dinner I needed to checkout the workout room. I changed into running attire and headed downstairs.

Now the workout facility in this hotel features two treadmills which I'm relatively sure were developed in Edison's lab. The treadmill I chose was basically a piece of rubber stretched between two coffee cans with a gerbil running for a motor. It was an ugly machine. To make matters worse, I learned a quick lesson in altitude adjustment. My home in Brownsburg, Indiana sits right about 800 ft in elevation. Louisville -- 5560 ft. Couple this with the fact that I normally workout on a low impact Precor machine versus this hellish gerbil wheel featured at this hotel, and you have a good image forming of how poorly this workout went. I sweat. I huffed. I gargled linguini and shrimp. After about 15 minutes, I pulled my shirt up to wipe off my forhead, and I let out a stiffled squeak. My skin had turned completely pink. Not just splotchy here and there, my gut looked like a hairy bottle of Pepto Bismol. Not pretty. As I fell off the treadmill after 30 minutes, I turned to swear at it, but couldn't catch enough breath to get out anything more than "stupiiiii peee of shhh..."

I made it a full 30 minutes, but I'm not so sure that I'll be able to do this every night while I'm out here. Perhaps tomorrow night I'll try running outside versus running on the treadmill on loan from Medieval Times.

Bret