The Fitness Episode

Your heart is pounding in your ears. You feel like your whole body is on fire. Sweat is dripping out of every pore, and every nerve is tingling with pain and pleasure at the same time. You can feel your body moving, almost pulsing is if to some internal rythym. You groan and pant...all you can think about is how close you are to finishing.

Yep. You're out for a run.

Being fit is a tricky business. On the one hand, you want to look to awesome in that new Jcrew perfect fit tee that you just bought...you know, the one thats kinda sheer? On the other hand...as much as you wish you were Wendy-Workout, you are really just dying to lay on the couch watching reruns of Friends and stuffing your face with Cheezits and M&Ms. But the latter isn't going to get you back into those size 26 Sevens you wore in high school and its definitely not going to get your finger into that Harry Winston you've been eyeing (MRS degree? Yes please!).

Now that we think about it, it is a little presumptuous of us to even be writing the fitness episode. We certainly are not experts in the field. But we struggle with it a lot, and since this is about our life and not about what we know (in fact...more often than not, it's about what we don't know) we're going to go ahead and talk about it. So just...read on. Or don't. You won't really learn anything.

If you're like us, you wake up every morning and start thinking about what you have to do that day. Invariably you block off some time for a high intensity work out and then a shower. And invariably, by the time the hour of the workout rolls around, you've already come up with some clever but justifiable excuse for why you can't make it to the gym today. Sound familiar?

Our roommate, Tessa, has a different approach to fitness. When asked about how she stays fit and flirty, she says, "well I basically just sit around all day and don't work out but I eat healthy." Tessa is thin. We are considering her approach to staying in shape, but she says that she is built naturally thin...plus, we enjoy french fries every now and then.

Something else that totally falls under this topic is our warped idea of what body type is attractive in men now that we are frat stars. We used to be attracted to the rock hard abs and chiseled pecs and biceps of athletes and movie stars; however, in just one year we have drastically altered our perception of male foxyness. We have passed up washboards in favor of doughy mounds, and we have foregone chiseled in favor of brand-name frat gear (who doesn't like a guy in chinos and Vineyard Vines?). We see these guys as catches, when a year ago we wouldn't have even given them a second look. Our question: How did we not negotiate this deal for ourselves? Seriously? We want to have beer bellies and pale limbs and still be considered dreamy. This is not fair. We've been gypped.

Anyway...it's basically too late now. Our rant, for once, was pointless and we have no solution. Our only hope is that we can some how muster the energy and motivation to want fitness for ourselves, purely for the joy of living an active and healthy life style. Until then, you can probably find us in room 413 huddled around a TV with some type of processed food within reach.

We feel like we should really be ending this post on a more upbeat note in which we mention going outside and enjoying the day, or maybe some quirky/funny but effective fitness or health tip. But the reality is, we aren't going to follow our own advice so we aren't going to burden you with it either.

Sex burns calories. That is all.

The Summer Episode

You just got back from an awesome weekend at an awesome beach/lake/ranch house of a close or not-so close friend. You come home to the apartment you'll be living in for the next two months (until July 31st, at which point you'll have that awkward span of 7 to 15 days in which you have nowhere to live until your new lease starts. Hello U-haul, lets move home for a week.) Your roommates all just moved back, and all the little future frat stars are pouring into campus for orientation. That's right. It's summer in Austin.

We like to think of summer as a time to start over. Didn't like the grades you got spring semester? Make it up to yourself in summer school. Tired of your roommates? Yay, you get new ones! Burned out on school? You have two months to catch your breath. Need to lose that 10 lbs you gained in the past year? Well...good luck. Let us know how that goes. Make new friends, work on your tan, try new things. Summer is the time when you've got nothing to lose. We have found that having nothing to lose is often strangely liberating. Summer is almost like the time of year that doesn't count, isn't it? "Yea...I made out with that guy in [insert fraternity here]. But it was summer, doesn't count!"

When we hear summer, we think freedom. We think sun, coconut scented lotion, and remembering how hot the pavement actually gets. During the summer we let go, decompress, let our hair down and soak up life. Summers are for refreshing.

We have developed a solemn resolution to make this summer the best of our lives (for the record, so far so good :-)

So far, we haven't developed firm plans as to how we're going to accomplish that. We've watched a lot of Gray's Anatomy, eaten a lot of late-night honey butter chicken biscuits, and donned some serious summer frat gear (we love seersucker season!). The point is, that we're here in Austin, living the dream. The other day, an incoming freshman said to us, "It still hasn't hit me that I'm coming here, that this is my life." My first thought was, "Girl, it still hasn't hit me yet either." Sure, we've taken a year's worth of classes, been to formals, taken finals, consumed more KA punch than we care to admit, made friends and missed our families (but not enough to actually go home), and come to the close of our pledge year, but we still can't believe that we have it so good. We would ask you to pinch us, but we'll just go ahead and pinch each other in the name of expediency.

We think the theme of our summer should be simply this: to soak it up. With another year under our belt, we have decided that this is going to be the summer that counts. So here's to the impending margaritas, man-tank (otherwise known as manks) and Chaco's sunburns, and straight A's (thank you summer school classes for fitting so well into our partying schedule). We'll be carrying around Smirnoff ice in our innocent-looking Tory Burch summer satchels...you've been warned. ;)

Top Ten Tips for Having a Summer as Awesome as ours:

Step 1: Move to Austin. Duh.

Step 2: Ingest large gusts of air for lunch.

Step 3: Break out the LFO. New kids on the block had lots of hits, chinese food makes me sick. Yea, we're summer girls. (but there will be NO abercrombie and fitch. We'll forgive LFO...it was 1999)

Step 4: Frat hard, frat often.

Step 5: Rinse and repeat Step 4.

Step 6: When your liver can't handle any more fratting, warm up your blockbuster card with seasons of Entourage and Gray's. Duh.

"There's no half-singing in the shower. You're either a rock star or an opera diva."-Josh Groban. We think this pretty much sums up what we're trying to say. Thanks Josh.