Hibernatin’.

Ask me the last time I went to the gym. Go on, ask me. It’s ok. Ask me. Go on.

I can’t even remember.

That’s right. All the good work I accomplished in the summer with walking and working out has gone to the dogs. I can’t even remember the last time I entered my local gym, which is sad because the gym doesn’t forget to extract their monthly membership, do they?

So in case you haven’t heard, the East Coast in currently consumed by an arctic cold. Somehow, we’ve entered the mid-January type dredges of winter one month into autumn (no surprise there. Autumn lasts about 5 minutes in these parts). That means that from morning to night, there’s no comfortable place outside of your home. Everywhere is painfully cold. Scarves wrapped around frozen faces, ineffectual gloves covering our poor fingers, big winter coats that are kind of powerless against the unrelenting chill in the air. Now: combining all of the latter with shorter days and darkness by 5pm? Means that I won’t ever leave my house to go to the gym ever again. Not until next year. Next spring. Next summer. I mean, it is cold, you guys. And where it’s not cold is my living room, where I have my couch, some ginger ale, and episodes of Castle and re-runs of Murder, She Wrote. One cannot expect me to abandon those things for an hour on a loveless elliptical. Why not work out at home, someone may ask? Well, that’s why I have a gym membership. The motivation for me to work out at home is as powerful as my desire to walk outside right now without a hat and gloves. In other words, when at home, working out is the last thing I want to do.

So what’s the solution here? How can I marry my desire to stay in the house with my slightly muted but admittedly very present desire to keep my exercise routine going and not diminish all the strides I made this year?

*crickets*

Right. I’m staying in.

(Especially difficult is the fact that I want to ingest every bad carbohydrate ever created while sitting on the couch with my remote. All is lost, my friends. My face is getting dangerously puffy.) 

Any suggestions?