Triathletes Suck at Weight Training

OK, so most of them are great. This one is not. Or at least she thought she was until coachancé told her to step it up and use the "real man's" leg press--the one where you add weights to each side, practically lie on your back, stick your feet in the air, release a lever, and do repetitions, slowly letting it come down toward you, then pushing it back up, then putting the lever back into place.

It didn't seem so difficult when coachancé came with me to do it the first time. He added 90lbs of weight, showed me how to do it, then I did it. So a few days later, when I was alone, I walked right on over to the leg press in the "man" section of my gym, ready to show off my mad leg-press skills.

I loaded up my 90 lbs, added 50 more because 90 wasn't hard enough the first time, took off the release lever and BAM! I didn't have a split second of slowly lowering the platform toward me before it came heaving itself toward my face. Thank God for the safety thing that keeps it from completely squishing you, and for my disgustingly flexible hips, or else I'd have been split in two.

Lying there with my feet by my face, I turned to look at the cute guy doing the leg press next to me, and made a discovery. "I didn't know all of those weights were on there!" I said. The weights on the bottom peg, which I thought were the spare weights, were actually (obviously) hung up on the machine and not in standby mode. In addition to the 140lbs I had added when I got there, there were already 270lbs on the machine, for a total force of 410 tridiva crushing pounds.

I wiggled myself out of the machine to the side, then started to take the weights off. Even with all of them off, it was a struggle to squeeze myself back in there and push the platform back into the start position when I had to start pushing with my knees beside my ears.

So much for strutting my stuff in the "man" section of my gym. I'm sure the people monitoring the cameras at the front desk had a laugh. I shall not be wandering over there un-coachancé supervised in the near future, embarrassed by my complete failure to recognize the mechanical properties of the leg press. Needless to say, I was not a Mechanical Engineering major.

Happy Weight Training! (Without turning yourself into a human pretzel!)

xoxo

TriDiva