Iron rails & iron weights

Sunday, May 4, 2008
11:17:00 AM EDT
Risk/reward calculation

Friday afternoon commuting offers a unique perspective on the risk/reward balance.  Heading home after a long workweek I have even less desire than usual to deal with the LIRR's frequent delays.  Being 15 minutes late on a Friday afternoon is the equivalent of being 30 minutes late on any other day.  Incidentally, this applies only to Fridays, there being relatively little difference in being late on other days of the week.  Fridays are an outlier.  Balancing this high risk, however, is an equally high reward.  Maybe even a specially high reward.  A delay-free trip home on a Friday afternoon provides a level of satisfaction unmatched on any other day.  All of this is a preamble to saying that today was, fortunately, on the high-reward side of the equation.  Even the morning was pretty decent too.  The Medford shuttle was on time as usual, and once at Ronkonkoma I decided - no real reason, just variety - to take the 7:04 Penn Station express rather than the 6:56 Flatbush Avenue train.  This is the sort of decision that can blow right up in my face, as the 7:04 is often a cattle train and usually gets packed full of SCA's.  Today was a lucky exception, with ridership not too high.  No one sat next to me until Farmingdale - usually, the train's nearly SRO after Deer Park - and the person who took the seat was a tall but fairly thin man.  I really had nothing to complain about ... how unusual!  There was an on-time arrival at Penn, though my wait for a 1 train to Houston Street was borderline annoying, somewhere in the range of five to seven minutes.

I had an easy time getting to Penn after work, with very short waits for the subway at both Houston Street and 14th.  The one annoying part was the crowding in getting off the express platform at Penn, as the northernmost staircase is half blocked off for repairs.  It's been this way all week and probably will stay partially blocked for weeks or months to come. The Transit Authority takes absurdly long amounts of time to effect simple repairs that private businesses do - sometimes literally - overnight.  I had enough time to make the 5:41 to Ronkonkoma with no trouble, and sat in one of the cars closer to the head of the train than usual.  Once again, I had no real reason for doing so, just variety's sake.  An older woman, certainly well past normal retirement age, sat next to me but got off at Hisckville.  I had an empty seat next to me for the remainder of the delay-free ride.  One sign that summer isn't far off was the shuttle, which was packed.  Friday afternoons in warm weather are by far its busiest time.

Gym: It hasn't been quite a week, but I got back to weights tonight.  In part it's because I have gotten so bored with the treadmill and the elliptical!  To ease back into things I did some relatively light work.  Bench press: 6 x 135, 4 x 185, 2 x 205, 2 x 5 x 225, 4 x 225, 2 x 8 x 185, 2 x 4 x 205, 2 x 2 x 230.  This up-and-down-and-up pattern is a bit unusual, but I decided to mix things up a bit.  Cable rows: 3 x 8 x 180, 2 x 8 x 170.  That was enough for tonight.


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