Now, I am all in favor of lawns and art and lawn art. And these little statuettes from home-furnishing cataloguer Frontgate might just make a fine gift. But boy putting and girl putting will run you $2,500. Each.

Reagan National Airport, the Washington Post reports, offers the least healthy options among the 15 busiest airports. A study revealed that less than 50 percent of the airport’s eateries offer a healthy meal option.

This slam on our local airport was produced by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. A quick scan of the org’s website reveals that we have a few things in common: we both hate diabetes, we both want to take care of hearts in a heart-smart way, and we approve of a vegetarian diet. But I never heard about the need to reform the March of Dimes.

And, frankly, I don’t ever think about eating at Reagan National or any airport. There are certainly bigger issues out there. Especially issues that don’t involve whether cheese is applied to your mushroom sandwich or not.

So please Committee for Responsible Medicine: Find Something Else To Bitch About. And leave the airports alone.

Ok. I admit it. I like the elliptical trainer. It’s easy, efficient, and doesn’t hurt nearly as much as running. But last night, ovalizing myself toward nowhere, with nothing on TV and too much mopey indie rock on my iPod, I finally got bored. I started missing group sports. Unfortunately, my only real experiences have been with ballet (I was the short, roundish girl in a room full of spindly 6-year-olds) and karate at a smelly South Philly dojo. By then I was 25, not as round and scared to death of the killing machines in my class.

So I’m still not entirely sold on martial arts, but this looks mesmerizing … and fun. And you can do it with a friend or an enemy.

Some friends and I got together last Friday to try out the Restorative Yoga class at my gym. Now, like any self-respecting 26-year-old, I’ve spent plenty of time at yoga. I’ve sat cross-legged on more mats than I’d like to count, groaned my way through a series of Downward Dogs, and uttered Namaste with the best of them.

Except that I was the worst of them. I can’t do Downward Dog and my mind races right through the class’s most meditative moments. The minute I get to yoga, I flash back to my anti-athletic youth—chosen last for sports teams and faking injuries to get out of running laps. Then I think about all the work I have to do and how I’m going to pay my bills. By the time my 10 minutes of meditation are over, I’m in the middle of a panic attack complete with a fluttering heartbeat and the sweats. At least I look like I’ve had a workout.

That’s why Restorative Yoga is so good for me. My gym advertises it as more relaxing than sleep. And it’s just about as strenuous, too. Restoration Yoga involves lying face down on a pile of blankets, turning your head from one side to the other. An instructor slowly makes the rounds, lightly rubbing your back and spreading a blanket over you if you’re cold. It’s heaven, if heaven were naptime.

In fact, my only problem with Restorative Yoga is that I find the name deceptive. It isn’t exercise. It’s a way for young professionals, primarily women, to have an hour of infancy, curled up in a fetal position while a nurturing mother figure caters to our needs.

Which is why I don’t think men should be the only ones accused of arrested development these days. When the movie Knocked Up came out, critics seized on the guys reluctant to give up their pot and porn. The Nation’s Katha Pollitt wrote, “the real subject of Knocked Up is the immaturity of men: only under the most desperate circumstances will they put aside their bongs, or their porn, or their even more idiotic friends.” Perhaps. But I think women have their Peter Pan moments, too. Just take the estrogen-fest of Restorative Yoga.

New Washington City Paper parent company Creative Loafing is all about being an “Urban Explorer.”

I’ll be honest: I’m not exactly sure what an Urban Explorer is (surely not this!). My exploration into the concept — as the Loafers say, “Welcome to where you are. Where are you? You are here … Even if you’re not here, but there” — left some possibilities to be explored. Still, in the interest of pleasing the ’rents, I’m willing to explore the possibility of Urban Exploration.

So last weekend, a friend and I entered into the Washington, D.C. leg of something called “High Trek Adventure.” The event, which City Paper sponsors, claims to be “The Most Exciting Urban Adventure Game Ever Created!” And hell, if I’m going to set out on an Urban Exploration, it might as well be the most exciting Urban Exploration created — ever.

Every year, High Trek Adventure stops by D.C. and sets pairs of UrbExes racing to be crowned the best explorers of their urban jungle. This year, the point of departure was Chinatown basement joint Rocket Bar. There, each team was provided with some pin-on racing numbers and a set of clues — anagrams, word puzzles, and the like— that, when deciphered, revealed a landmark that the team then had to locate and photograph before moving on to the next location. High Trek handed us the clues and told us that Harpoon IPA was on special for— $4 dollars— when we got back! Then, they set us loose.

It turns out that Urban Exploring takes more than just being where you are, here, even when you’re not here, but there. It takes a lot of sprinting, some serious photographic accuracy in the self-shot, and a tolerance for scalp burn. If you’re really serious about it, — like this year’s winning team, who explored their way to two free tickets on Southwest, — Urban Exploring also takes Bluetooth, some sculpted calves, and an Extremely Serious Demeanor.

As for my partner and I, it turns out that we’re not the most efficient Urban Explorers in the world. We were going strong until we reached the midpoint clue — “Head down to the National Mall, where you’ll receive your next set of clues.” Though skeptical of the clue’s broadness, my partner and I did as we were told. We explored. And explored. And EXPLORED that one-mile stretch of national treasure for a full hour. It took us about half a dozen back-and-forths through the Black Family Reunion festival — with some stupid numbers taped to our chests and a sweaty sheet of word puzzles in our hands until we finally located the cheery High Trek Adventure clue distributor hanging out under some shady tree near the Natural History Museum. It was almost — almost —enough to kill the Urban Explorers in us altogether.

When my partner and I finally made it back to Rocket Bar, our explorer’s spirit was unbroken, but our camera was — it whirred and flashed but revealed no evidence of our urban adventure.

All of which is by way of saying: Urban Exploration is a cruel mistress. We ditched the Harpoon and explored some Miller Light instead.

I’ve always accepted the unfortunate fact that men age better than women. We last longer, but they look better. Maybe not, according to Gina Kolata’s recent piece in the Times. Unlike men, who get slower as they get older, we can get faster. Women are brought up with warnings against “overdoing it.” But it turns out the warners were wrong. Kolata says it takes women a few years to realize that pain is good. And pain makes you faster. So, at an impressive rate, older women beat younger women in races.

I was always the girl who ran from the ball in school. Only recently have I begun enjoying the benefits of overdoing it. Last night, I followed a younger, fitter man on a cyclocross training course that required me to crash over rocks and ride sideways across tilting downhill slopes with my feet locked into the pedals of a skinny-tired bike. I crashed once—trying to spin up an impossibly steep incline and falling backwards down the hill. The next time, I made it.

There used to be a time when gym rats would judge you merely by the size of your ass—or by the size of your free weights or by even the magazine that you read on the stationary bike. But ever since my gym installed TVs on its elliptical machines, there’s a whole new criteria for passing judgment on your machismo: what programs you watch.

Now, you have to understand that I spend most of my time sitting in chairs in dark rooms, stuffing high-calorie foods down my gullet. I don’t exactly look like Albert Pujols, you know? So I try to use stupid humor at the gym to overcompensate for my lack of pecs and washboard abs. I have a wide assortment of T-shirts with sayings on them, such as “I Like Glue!” or “Got Clemens?”

But yesterday, as I was working on destroying some of those calories tucked into body parts I didn’t have two years ago, I noticed that the woman next to me on the elliptical was watching a bloody episode of CSI on Spike TV. I was watching Emeril Lagasse make a grilled banana split on the Food Network. I felt the need to turn the channel to ESPN.

I’ve been a serious gym obsessive for several years now, in several different cities. I had the scuzzy, muscle-man gym in Philly, the hip, scenester gyms in Portland and Seattle. All three have had a dominant pack of gay men who basically run the place. Like most straight girls, I find the homosexual presence pretty comforting in a setting that involves sweating and tight clothes. You don’t get ogled and hit on all the time, and you can ogle men without risk of anything other than them thinking you have a staring problem.

But the gay-male presence at the “Dupont Circle” Results I recently joined is way beyond dominant. The gym is all men. And they’re a little territorial. On my tour I was shown the special women-only weights area. I thought it was great, an added comfort zone. After joining I realized it’s more like the women’s ghetto. I get icy stares when I work out anywhere else, and our little play lot doesn’t have as many weights or as nice of equipment as the two floors of weights used freely by lots and lots of men.

So I’ve decided to rebel. I’m going to stake out space in man land and see what happens.