OK Commuter
Ah, running.
In response to what has been over the past several months both an alarming shift in my physique and a desperate need to breathe non office-supplied air, I have recently rediscovered the brutal realities of RUNNING. Or, put more precisely in my case, Sugared Retard On The Escape.
Given this scarily comfortable period of sedentary decay, it came as no surprise to me after the run that my body had hopelessly lost touch with certain kinds of physical manuevers, such as movement. This could be seen by the rapid transformation of Cute 12 Year Old Nicky's Love Handles That Grandma Pinched when they seem to have exploded, spilling so far over my jeans that I've been forced to buy shoes for them. On the plus side, I have four legs.
No running exercise is complete without proper stretching, though, and fortunately for me this is something I can do. Confidently striding toward the stretching area, my eyes honed in on the lone person stretching there. Ohnoyoudont. A 300 year old woman was clearly issuing a direct challenge to my stretching prowess, impressively executing the two handed Bar Hang stretch. I'm not sure that she qualified for this stretch being that her feet were planted firmly on the ground... but I digress. After rattling off an intimidating array of toe touches and a full 10-minute primal scream session to get the lungs going, I set off on my quest for 3 laps.
H.o.l.y. s.h.i.t.
I'd grossly over-estimated my ability to move distances farther than my desk to the printer, thus on the second lap I cautiously chose to slow it down, and by that I mean I walked the whole lap. This felt good, but after crossing paths with folk twice my age who were inexplicably still running, and also given the presence of girls, I sucked it up and completed the final lap. It is safe to summarize my running philosophy with this difficult equation:
If: girl
Then: run.
Side note: While running, I passed by couple of fathers playing a game of "pepper" with their sons before the baseball game. Initially one of the portly pops was on the toss-and-catch end of things, aiming to tag the son in the middle, but he soon felt it necessary to take on the roll of base runner. You can kind of tell what happened next; while his son tossed the ball to his teammate on the other end, pops wisely turned his head and was beaned in the face. Haha! It was funny to hear the creative flow of expletives he soon screamed while holding his head, crumbling to the ground and kicking his feet up and down like a child.
Ah well. This whole running crusade brings to light a larger issue, I think, and that is my excessive sense of self-consciousness. My friend Brian observantly noted this last weekend while another friend Anthony WILDLY SWERVED OUR CAR ON THE CHICAGO HIGHWAY because it is apparently funny to do so, assholes. Anyway, this is true to some extent and certainly just days ago at Target. Shuffling in with an unsettling symphony of gastro-intestinal pandemonium, I found myself clutching only that vital pink bottle, beads of sweat pooling at my brow, wondering what the other customers were thinking of the freak who by all indications would explode any second.
"I can't just take this to the cashier," I thought, "not just this. They'll know."
Therefore to "normalize" my basket, I rushed over to the next aisle of logical sequence to Pepto Bismol and ended up with none other than: two boxes of macaroni.
Sigh. Baby steps.
In response to what has been over the past several months both an alarming shift in my physique and a desperate need to breathe non office-supplied air, I have recently rediscovered the brutal realities of RUNNING. Or, put more precisely in my case, Sugared Retard On The Escape.
Given this scarily comfortable period of sedentary decay, it came as no surprise to me after the run that my body had hopelessly lost touch with certain kinds of physical manuevers, such as movement. This could be seen by the rapid transformation of Cute 12 Year Old Nicky's Love Handles That Grandma Pinched when they seem to have exploded, spilling so far over my jeans that I've been forced to buy shoes for them. On the plus side, I have four legs.
No running exercise is complete without proper stretching, though, and fortunately for me this is something I can do. Confidently striding toward the stretching area, my eyes honed in on the lone person stretching there. Ohnoyoudont. A 300 year old woman was clearly issuing a direct challenge to my stretching prowess, impressively executing the two handed Bar Hang stretch. I'm not sure that she qualified for this stretch being that her feet were planted firmly on the ground... but I digress. After rattling off an intimidating array of toe touches and a full 10-minute primal scream session to get the lungs going, I set off on my quest for 3 laps.
H.o.l.y. s.h.i.t.
I'd grossly over-estimated my ability to move distances farther than my desk to the printer, thus on the second lap I cautiously chose to slow it down, and by that I mean I walked the whole lap. This felt good, but after crossing paths with folk twice my age who were inexplicably still running, and also given the presence of girls, I sucked it up and completed the final lap. It is safe to summarize my running philosophy with this difficult equation:
If: girl
Then: run.
Side note: While running, I passed by couple of fathers playing a game of "pepper" with their sons before the baseball game. Initially one of the portly pops was on the toss-and-catch end of things, aiming to tag the son in the middle, but he soon felt it necessary to take on the roll of base runner. You can kind of tell what happened next; while his son tossed the ball to his teammate on the other end, pops wisely turned his head and was beaned in the face. Haha! It was funny to hear the creative flow of expletives he soon screamed while holding his head, crumbling to the ground and kicking his feet up and down like a child.
Ah well. This whole running crusade brings to light a larger issue, I think, and that is my excessive sense of self-consciousness. My friend Brian observantly noted this last weekend while another friend Anthony WILDLY SWERVED OUR CAR ON THE CHICAGO HIGHWAY because it is apparently funny to do so, assholes. Anyway, this is true to some extent and certainly just days ago at Target. Shuffling in with an unsettling symphony of gastro-intestinal pandemonium, I found myself clutching only that vital pink bottle, beads of sweat pooling at my brow, wondering what the other customers were thinking of the freak who by all indications would explode any second.
"I can't just take this to the cashier," I thought, "not just this. They'll know."
Therefore to "normalize" my basket, I rushed over to the next aisle of logical sequence to Pepto Bismol and ended up with none other than: two boxes of macaroni.
Sigh. Baby steps.
posted by Nicky @ 6/07/2006 02:44:00 AM
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