Tuesday, February 17

Exhaustion

I really don’t know how I ever made it into work today.  For reasons I don’t quite understand, perhaps just the inertia from a long weekend, I was in a state of total exhaustion this morning.  Fortunately, I was able to work a shorter day than usual, and drove to Ronkonkoma for the 7:57 to Penn.  Not having taken this train anytime recently I didn’t know what to expect in terms of crowding.  It actually approached cattle train levels, with almost all of the middle seats taken by the time we got to Jamaica.  It’s possible that the crowding levels were higher than usual because of the holiday weekend, or perhaps the car in which I rode, near the east end of the consist, was especially crowded, but nonetheless it seems fair to classify the 7:57 as among the busier of the morning trains out of Ronkonkoma – not quite as packed as the 7:19, on par with the 7:04, and more crowded than the 6:56 to Flatbush Avenue and the 7:32.  My experience with the 7:40 to Flatbush is too limited to make any judgments.  One thing noteworthy about the 7:57 is that women seemed to make up a high percentage of the ridership.  It is similar in that respect to the 7:32.  It’s been suggested that the earlier trains are mostly men because the male-dominated financial services industry has generally early starting hours.  In any event, it was an easy enough ride, with a tall but not wide – and that’s the dimension that counts – casually dressed man in his late 20’s taking the seat next to me at Deer Park.  I tried reading, then playing some cell phone Tetris, but just couldn’t concentrate on either.  Once we got to Penn I waited about two or three minutes for a 3 train to Fulton, not bad for the tail end of rush hour.

I was able to leave work early enough to get the 5:01 to Ronkonkoma, though if it hadn’t been for a very short wait for a 3 at Fulton I wouldn’t have made it in time.  It wasn’t crowded at all, which seems to be the usual rule with that train, though my hopes for an empty seat next to me ended at Jamaica when a 40ish woman sat there.  Still, she wasn’t much of an annoyance, and unlike the case in the morning I actually could concentrate on Tetris.  No decent games, unfortunately.

Gym: I really didn’t have the energy to go, but after some consideration finally forced myself to make a quick visit.  It started out with some relatively uninspiring bench presses, with the sub-225 warmup sets done using a narrow grip: 6 x 135, 4 x 185, 2 x 205, 6 x 225, 5 x 225, 4 x 225, 3 x 225, 2 x 225, 1 x 225.  Next came a total of 40 neutral grip pull-ups, just enough to hit my weekly quota of 110: 6 x 6, 1 x 4.  I had wanted to do some work on the heavy bag, but just like the last few times I’ve tried to do it there were some young people’s lessons being held in the boxing area.  One of these days my timing will have to be better.