A moment of silence please

I sold my Soloflex home gym today. I got it a few months after I moved to Pittsburgh waaaaaay back in 1996 off a classified ad in the newspaper (before Craigslist. Geez, was Amazon even in business then? Ebay?). In retrospect, it's kind of surprising that I was able to get one in the first palce just because of how big and heavy they are (I think all told we're talking about 120lbs of metal and the longest piece of the thing is about 6 feet) and the only model car I've ever owned is the Honda Accord. Yeah, the Japanese engineers didn't really have hauling huge hunks of metal around in mind when they designed it. Luckily the dude I bought it from had a truck and for $20 delivered it to me. It's a nice piece of machinery. I wish I had the room to keep it. Not that I'm any kind of athletic specimen, but it did serve as a daily reminder to do some sort of exercise. It probably kept me in decent shape during the first 2-3 years I was in Pittsburgh when I'd be too mentally tired to trek over to Trees Hall to exercise after work. Sort of luckily the apartment building I was in built an exercise room in the first floor my second year of living there. That was the beginning of the end of the utility of the Soloflex machine but I'd still do some dips or pull ups on it every so often. Then the Bellefield Hall exercise room was built, which was a lot closer and easier to get to than Trees, knocking the Soloflex down another notch or two.

It wasn't too out of place in my last apartment as my bedroom was huge, but the bedroom in my condo is quite a bit smaller. I had to put it between my bed and the window as there was no other place for it. It made for an adventure to open/close the window in the middle of the night-- it was hard enough to get around it to the window when I was fully awake, let alone half asleep. Last week, I finally got to the point of wanting the space more than the Soloflex. I hadn't used it in the last 2 years other than to hang my clothes on it to dry (that seems to be the fate of most home exercise equipment. The clothes hanging phase is the menopause/middle-age equivalent stage for exercise equipment, I have concluded) so I thought with the new year coming up and the other changes I'm making in my life I'd also finally get rid of the Soloflex.

So I posted a Craigslist ad. I paid $320 for it back then (when a new machine was $2000). Not bad. CL had a few other Soloflexes listed in the $120-200 range. Since I was more interested in getting a little something for it than as much as possible and the buyer had to haul it away, I listed it at $75. That probably opened me up to getting a lower offer when it came down to selling (you can expect that on CL whenever you sell something anyway), but I was ok with that so long as the buyer would come to haul it away. I eventually got $65 for it which was just fine with me, especially since the guy brought a friend to help him load it onto his truck. My bedroom looks more like an actual bedroom now, instead of a storage locker.

I'm still a little sad. I've had that thing for all but 3 months of my time in Pittsburgh and as stupid as it sounds, it was like having a good friend move away. I'll miss it. I'll still be able to exercise with Bellefield Hall being so close and in all truthfullness I hadn't used the Soloflex at all in 2 years. Still, the Soloflex came into my life during a more innocent and optimistic time. Not having it around anymore just makes the difference between myself then and now all the more striking.

But at least I found a good home for it.