The Best Days of an Elliptical

Funny, but I do not really recall the best days of an elliptical, except that when we bought the Precor EFX 523, it seemed the best model available. Exciting time. If I recall correctly, we bought it from one of my clients who worked at a store that sells exercise equipment. You would think I would have learned from a previous purchase of the treadmill coatrack but no, I thought an elliptical would be different.

At first, I used the elliptical almost religiously, for at least a month or two. Then something interfered and changed that schedule. Maybe work, I’m guessing, because I was working on 75+ escrows at a time when we bought the elliptical. The best days of an elliptical were probably right after the second market crash of 2008. Short sales consumed my life back then, and almost all of my transactions were short sales.

Because I personally sold and negotiated so many short sales, I was putting in days from 5 AM to 9 PM at night, sometimes later. With butt planted in chair, I hardly moved or left my desk. Exercising on an elliptical in the next room seemed the answer. If I could get to it.

That was about the time I wrote a book. The publisher demanded 60,000 words, so I figured if I wrote 1,000 words a day, I would be finished in two months. And I was. But it left no time for the elliptical. I was also still creating homebuying content for About.com, which is now The Balance. Further, by 2011, I was selling more than 150 homes a year.

At one point, the best days of an elliptical for me were the spring and early summer of 2014 when I decided to drop 20 pounds. I worked out on the elliptical for an hour and then hopped on my bicycle to zoom around the Land Park golf course. In mid-June, my team member Barbara Dow and I took off for 10 glorious days in Maui, living high on the hog on the top floor of the Fairmont Kea Lani in Wailea.

It is with a bit of sadness that I part with the elliptical now, but I have not touched it for 5 years. Time to find a new home. I have discovered the best exercise program for me is the one I will actually do, which involves driving to the gym or to my yoga class.

We hauled it out of the house on Sunday and it departed in a big red pickup truck for its new home at a friend’s house. Recouped only about 10% of what I paid for it, but that is OK. The best days of an elliptical are when you first buy it, and when you sell it. Kinda like a boat, I guess.