Second week. More advanced.

My expensive, distractingly muscular trainer is trying to kill me. Or make me all muscly. But my money’s on the murder.

While last week was all about getting a feel (ahem) for what I was capable of in the gym, this morning was all about making me throw up. Or at least shake violently when I tried to use any motor skills during the day. We worked chest, back and legs in 45 take-no-prisoners minutes this morning, followed by a sadistic 10 minutes on the stretch tables, followed by a reasonably motor-skilled shower (alone, for the record), followed by a wobbly five-block walk to my office, followed by an entire day haunted by the feeling that I had been secretly filleted in my sleep and the deep, aching pain all over my body was just a manifestation of the fact that my muscles had been surgically separated from my bones in some nightmarish slasher movie.

In 18 years of regular workouts, I’ve done plenty of super sets (a term for rapidly alternating between different exercises that target the same muscles) but I’ve never done super sets that made it super hard to walk as though I'd yet to develop the locomotion skills of a toddler. This personal trainer stuff hurts in my muscles, my bones and even in the cushion in my checking account, but it also ROCKS in all the right places. I should have done this years ago, and I can't wait for Thursday's brutal attack. In the mean time, I'm going to attempt a training run on Wednesday morning. The official target is five miles, but I reserve the right to slash that distance drastically when I get to the end of our block. Because I might feel a lot of pain by then. Or I could feel nothing.