Whew...I'm beat.

Today I decided to get out of my house. It has been cloudy and rainy and cool here the past few days, but I decided that I would risk getting rained on for a little exercise. I walked a loop around our neighborhood and brought my handy-dandy camera with me. I stopped at the park behind the kids' school for a little boost in my activity. This park is like most children's parks here...complete with swings, slides, and various other play equipment. In the last year the city has also installed exercise equipment for the adults to play with in many of the parks around the city.


Here is the exercise section of the park. There are five different machines in this particular park.


There is the cross-country ski machine. It is smooth but doesn't seem to provide much exercise because there is no arm movement.


This is the lift-your-body-weight machine. It is amazingly hard...and quite awkward as well.


This machine is like a stepper with some serious arm movements. If you didn't have back trouble before getting on this machine you will most certainly have troubles when you get off. It is jerky and completely uncomfortable. On the side with the orange handle there is a disk that spins on the ground. Basically you stand on the disk holding onto the orange handle and twist at the waist. I didn't realize the disk was missing from my picture when I took it. In the background you can see a yellow platformed machine. This machine requires you to stand on the platform and hold onto the red handles on either side of you. You are supposed to swing your legs from side to side while holding on. Again...this seemed to cause major back strain.

Now I have to say I have never been to one of these parks when there were no people on these machines. Most of the time they are full of people working out. I've had my camera before but didn't feel comfortable taking pictures of people stretching their calves, quads, gluts, pecs, wrists, chins, toes, and fingers as they were working out or preparing to work out. And I am 100% serious when I say that they stretched all those muscles. Today was different. There were a few moms pushing their kids on the swings, but nobody seemed interested in working out. I guess the cloudy, rainy, cool weather kept them away. It was my lucky day. I had the opportunity to try all the machines...and well...let me just say...

...after my 5 minutes of awkward I continued on my merry way.