It's no BSC...

Greeting from chilly northern Michigan!  As you may know, my family is blessed to be able to come up here every summer for a chunk of time.  I am married to a teacher, and we take full advantage of having our summers off to spend time in our own little slice of heaven.  It is too complicated to get into, but we won't have this place to come to forever, so we want to make the most of it while we can.

It took us about 19 hours to get up here.  We could cut through Canada, and it would only take 14 hours, but that would require we all have our passports.  Of course one day before we were to leave, I realized I didn't know where mine was.  Nice.  NOT!  So last Friday night we left around 8:30 PM, drive through the night, and arrived here around 4:00 PM.  DQ was a rock start and drove the entire way.  Five hour energy was a huge help.  So we got here Saturday afternoon and were dead tired.

Sunday we had a lazy Saturday morning before heading into town for our annual trek to Wal-Mart.  We are in the middle of nowhere up here, and Wal-Mart is our mecca.  Next to Wal-Mart is a SNAP fitness, which I promptly joined.  We went home to unload the groceries, and then I went back out to the gym.

I was in for a shock when I went in!  SNAP is very well established, and are all over the country.  I have a friend from high school who owns two in CT.  That said, it is small, and NO BSC!  The best part of SNAP is that it is open 24 hrs, but not always staffed for 24 hrs.  You use a key card to get into the building.  Back to why I was in shock...it is SMALL!  I knew it wasn't going to be as big as BSC, but man-o-man is it small.  There are six elliptical machines, six treadmills and four bikes.  Then there are a variety of weight machine, and a floor to stretch and perhaps hold a small class.

Yesterday, Sunday, I jumped on a machine that I thought was an arc machine, which is my favorite machine at my home gym.  Turns out I was just on an elliptical.  I only made it 45 minutes, and was so frustrated.  At my home gym I determine how hard I am working by the number of strides per minute I am doing.  The machine at SNAP doesn't have strides per minute, but rather speed, like being on a treadmill.  After grumbling a little, I got over it and decided I needed to spend the month building up my speed.  I was eager to see how many calories I can burn on this machine.  At home I can burn 800 calories an hour.  Much to my frustration, I couldn't figure out how many calories I burned yesterday.  According to LoseIt. com I burned 450 calories for my 45 minute work-out.

Fast forward to this morning.  I woke up around 6:15, and headed off to the gym.  I chose a different elliptical, and had a good work-out.  I was sweating like crazy - something I didn't do yesterday.  I did went for one hour.  According to the machine, I burned just over 400 calories but according Lose It I burned about 600.  So I went somewhere around 500.  I feel pretty good about it.  This afternoon I did my second workout - twenty minutes or running and then a little bit of strength training.

My eating has been OK.  I think the worse thing I had was an entire bag of Bugles on the road.  I had pretzels in my hand, but I blame exhaustion and boredom for my poor choice.  The up side is I didn't snack nearly as much I normally do on road trips.

The next two days - Tuesday and Wednesday - are pretty nutty.  We are driving down to Indy to spend Tuesday with DQ's friends, and then Wednesday we are headed to Chicago to go see a Cubs game.  I will probably exercise tomorrow morning, doing the 20 minutes of cardio and then strength training.  As for Wednesday I know I won't get any exercise in.  Unless you count wandering Chi-town!

I'll write again Thursday!
Laters -
Mummy Qua