Hey, check out the fingers on the pudgy guy!

It’s the end of Week 7 of our big fitness challenge and I will attempt, using my massive vocabulary and powerful writing skills, to sum up how I have been doing in terms of exercising and eating over the last week: Bad!

If I were to elaborate on that, I would probably add the following descriptive remarks: Bad! Bad! Bad! Bad!

I think you catch my general drift here. The point I am trying to make, if I am going to be honest here, is that I have been bad.

It wasn’t so bleak at the beginning of the week. I went to the gym. Worked out. Did as many exercises as I could remember, including the ones where you lie backwards on a big blue rubber ball, stretch out so the ball is supporting your head and shoulders, then do presses and flies and curls with hand-weights.

I sweated profusely and felt pretty proud of myself for the rest of the day. The rest of the week, however, was kind of a blur. No time for the gym. Only time to pursue the demanding craft of thinking about professionally amusing things. Don’t thank me; it’s my job.

I tried to sneak in a bit of fitness in the sense that, whenever I left my office cubicle to get coffee, I walked down three flights of stairs to the cafeteria, then back up again.

Also, I’m pretty sure I took my basset hound out for a walk around the block, which counts as a total body workout because his hindquarters are moderately paralyzed by arthritis, which means when I walk him, I have to support his rear end by hoisting him up with a purple U of M faculty of agriculture scarf.

The two of us are thinking about putting out a workout video: Waddling Your Way To Fitness. We will also give diet tips, such as try not to eat things out of the waste-paper basket, and avoid deep-fried food.

I wish I’d remembered that second tip Thursday night at Mona Lisa Ristorante, where I attended a meeting to help organize this year’s Grape Stomp to raise funds for the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. It’s set for Sept. 16, by the way. You really need to come. Anyway, to be polite, it was necessary for me to consume large amounts of pizza, deep-fried mushrooms and deep-fried calamari.

Dieting is important, but manners are not to be sneered at, either. The point here is that Friday morning, I was feeling a tad logy when I dragged my body back to the gym. I was going to try another BodyPump class. This is a class wherein you lift barbells in time to music while an instructor with powerful lungs orders you to "stay in rhythm" or "suck your stomach in." It’s definitely 20 pounds of fun in a 10-pound bag.

But my fellow "fitness bunny," Tracy Mainland, couldn’t make it, so instead of getting pumped to music with a large group of women in Spandex, I forced myself to do every exercise I’d learned from my trainer at GoodLife Fitness, Jacqueline Vincent, known to friend and foe as "The Queen of Pain."

I did this — get ready to be impressed — all by myself. When I’d finished, I was standing around, sweating, huffing and puffing, and waiting for my heart to explode, when "The Queen" caught sight of me.

She came over, smiling, gazed at my sweat-soaked T-shirt and remarked: "Looks good on you, big guy!"

Wracked with guilt, I confessed I’d been bad, bad, bad. Surprisingly, Jacqueline did not squash me like a grape. Instead, she smiled and said: "When you’re working out, you get to fall off the wagon once in a while."

The point is, as she pointed out, you have to climb back on the fitness wagon as soon as possible. She also suggested I might want to pound down a protein shake to drive some of the bad deep-fried toxins out of my still-pudgy body.

So we have something like three weeks to go in our Spring Training challenge. I will try to get to the gym as much as possible, but it’s difficult, because I have to spend a lot of time WRITING about going to the gym, which kind of gets in the way of physically going to the gym.

That is my main physical activity these days — using my fingers to hammer away on a computer keyboard like a heavy metal drummer pounding on his (bad word) drum set. It’s not a total body workout, so it won’t help shrink my midsection.

But don’t get me angry, because my typing fingers are getting so buff I could use them to crack walnuts.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca