Getting an Edge

Status: Exhausted, much depleted of invective inventory, and pleased.

The Gazelle Edge exercise thingie arrived today, yippee! Further yippee: The young delivery man who toted its heavy boxed immensity up my ten front stairs was kind enough to then haul it inside and all the way to its future home in the living room. Where it sat while I got some rush work out of the way.

That done, I set about unboxing and sorting the contents, with a first set of imprecations to warm up for what lay ahead. The picture-and-word instructions were reasonably clear; all parts were present and accounted for; the sequence itself was not too involved; so it only took me about an hour and a few fucktons of curses to get it finished.

The first time mounting the beast was kinda scary; those footrests swing easily and you have GOT to hold the side bars, NOT the handles, to get aboard safely. But I did it!

And by golly, it works. It's easy to master the motion, it's not overly hard to do; yet I could feel enough effort being expended to believe that it will in fact do me some good to work out on it. It does take up some of my limited floor space, but not too much, and it will fold up. Best of all, my wonky joints didn't complain a bit.

The cats, natch, were horrified at the intruder who hauled it in; emerged from hiding to sniff cautiously at the box, then try their claws on it; fled the assembly cursing and played in the cast-aside packaging; and are now clumped around the edges of the Edge, no doubt annoyed because it's sitting right where several of them like to congregate in the hour before supper trying to guilt me into serving an early meal.

I hope I'm around to see it when one of them tries getting on one of the swinging footrests.

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Next morning update:

The Gazelle Edge -- so far, so good. I'm so deconditioned that it really does tire me out after a few minutes of not-that-hard work, so I've been using it in short bursts, as frequently as I can find occasions for. I did feel a little bit of "Hey, you've been making us work!" muscle ache this morning when I got up, nothing the usual morning activities couldn't warm me out of.

You do have to pay attention to some degree, as it's possible to get your right-left glides out of sync, or one leg working harder than the other. But you can still watch TV while gliding along.

It's primarily a lower-body exerciser, but it works better to tighten your gut muscles, and there is a small upper-body component that can't hurt, might help.

All in all, I do believe I've made the right choice for a home exercise contraption.