A Great Day at the Gym

We went out in New Brunswick last night, to Clydz and Efes, and I probably (certainly?) drank a little bit too much . . . and then I stayed up late watching TV, the US Open-- Djokovic lost to a giant young Australian dude-- and I ate too many late-night cookies that we purchased at the Kapadokya Bakery on our walk home  from New Brunswick while watching this tennis match, but I still dragged myself to the gym this morning at 7 AM and it was well worth it, for three reasons:

1) while I was shooting baskets, basically doing an aerobic work-out that involved tossing a ball beyond the three-point arc, collecting the ball, shooting the ball, and then chasing the rebound and doing it over and over again-- and at one point I drained ten or eleven three-pointers in a row and a dude walking off the court said to me, "You're on fire!" and it was nice to be recognized, it was nice that my fire was noticed;

2) later on, I was doing my balancing exercises on the bosu ball-- that piece of equipment that is half exercise ball, half flat surface: so I stand on the flat surface and balance and do a variety of exercises with a medicine ball while I balance: put it behind my back, do one-armed tricep raises, etcetera . . . anything to throw my balance off so my calf muscles have to work hard and there was another dude next to me on the other bosu ball, just trying to stand on it and he complimented me on my amazing balance and I was like: wtf? when do you get TWO compliments at the gym? and I considered it a very good day

3) while I was working out and getting all these compliments, I was listening to the new episode of "Plain English with Derek Thompson," which is all about the benefits of exercise-- Thompson talks about exercise with Euan Ashley, a professor of cardiovascular medicine and genetics at Stanford University, who boils down the benefits of exercise to a very motivational and succinct statistic:

“One minute of exercise buys you five minutes of extra life” 

so according to Derek Thompson's math: if you work out for one hour a day, four days a week, for 40 years, you would buy yourself an extra four years and nine months of extra life . . . that's a lot of extra life-- and you might even get a compliment once in a while.