meat marketing

2 games that are fun at the gym on a cold sunday afternoon:

1) racing on side-by-side treadmills. 40 minutes of "oh, yeah? i'll see that 9:30 mile and raise you another 30 seconds..." by the end i was trying to distract myself from wanting to quit by trying to picture which would cause more of a stir: stopping to vomit, or stopping because i fell off the treadmill. i'm pretty sure i lost the race to my blogmate, but it's a proud second place since i'm so tired i couldn't walk up the stairs to my apartment.

2) stroking the ego of the guy lifting weights next to us. (disclaimer: i'm not cheating on mmmb; i'm just the wing man. wingwoman? wingperson? anyway.) as we were dutifully taking turns at the pull-up/tricep dip machine, we noticed an attractive appropriately shaggy-grad-student type on the adjacent lat pull. so we stared, just a little. we saw the wedding ring right away, but then he saw us seeing the wedding ring. now, i'm not saying this guy was showing off because he had an audience. all i know is that two of us did three sets each of two exercises on that machine, and this guy was on that lat pull the whole time. maybe he really wanted to work his lats for ten sets, but seeing as his form got progressively worse, we were fairly sure he was enjoying the attention. so we kept staring to see how long lat-guy would stay. and the longer he stayed, the less attractive he became. there's something unsettling about a grinning man lifting weights, even if there are two badass hotties checking him out.