This morning I got up and my first thought was “I’m going to try out that stair stepper thing today!”

Our apartment complex has a teensy workout room with a treadmill, a stationary bike, a weight lifting thingie (it’s one of those kinds with all sorts of different weight lifting stuff all bolted together to save space) and one of those stair steppers.  I will not lie.  I have been fascinated with the stair stepper thing ever since I first watched Legally Blonde and it showed Elle reading her textbooks while working out on it.  In my brain this single piece of exercise equipment is what will save my health and my ass from becoming so large and flabby that I need an extra cart to carry it around whenever I go anywhere.

The stair stepper thingie was broken when we moved in and stayed that way until sometime during the last few months when it either got fixed or the owners bought a new one.  I discovered its magical-now-workingness last week when I went in to use the treadmill and thought I would try it out after I ran for a while but after ten minutes on the treadmill I realized that dying sounded much more appealing than doing any further movement (remember, am weenie).

Today though, today I had a plan.  I was going to go into the workout room and use that stair stepping thing! I was going to bounce up and down on those fake stair pusher pedals! I would look like my own slighly pudgy version of Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde and Charisma Carpenter in that episode of Veronica Mars and every other super in shape chick you’ve ever seen at the gym who was climbing those invisible stairs to nowhere while making it look easy as pie!  My heart rate would go up! I would be healthy! Except… Um…..

I need to preface this by reminding you that it took me a few tries to figure out how to properly work the treadmill and how to adjust my speed so that I wouldn’t either fly off the thing or have to put all of my weight into every step to get it to move.

Because I? Couldn’t quite figure out how to get the thing to work the way I wanted it to.  I mean, I understood the basic cocncept:  Climb on contraption. Push down with one foot and then the next.  Simulate act of climbing up many many flights of stairs at, preferably, a quick pace.  The movies! They make it look so easy! My experience on the stair stepper thing went something more like this:  puuuuuuuuuuuuuussssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh down.  Puuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuush down with other foot.  Puuuuusssshhhhhhhhhh  puuuuuussssshhhhhhhhhhhh  slowly but surely as if I was trying to haul Santa’s giant-ass sack of presents up thirty flights of stairs that had steps that were two and a half feet high.  Eventually I realized that I did not have to push the steps all the way down (causing me to do a weird lungey/ladder climbey move only more awkward), but still, I could not get any sort of rhythm or equal height of steps going.  And I kind of felt really stupid and was glad that I was in there by myself.

So.  There was no bobbing, no pony tail swinging, no looking all agile and fit and trim and in shape.  But I did experience a muscle burn fairly intense so I’m pretty sure I managed to work something even if I did not look at all good while doing it.