Tuesday, January 15, 2008

The Great Race

Ok, so one of the things I feared the most almost happened.

I have no been to the gym for quiet some time, which made me re-enter the deadly 200lb zone. So I got my act back together and started back at the gym last night. The hardest thing for me to do is to start working out on a constant basis, so when I noticed it was 7:30 and I was still in the office and the gym closes at 8, I thought for sure my plan to shed some weight was already doomed.

But somehow when I got home, I got the will to go running outside. This is very unusual for me because there are a few factors that keep me from running outside in the winter months. 1) My lungs freeze very easily. If I even start to breathe heavily, my lungs don't seem to want to function well. Even if I breathe in through my nose and out my mouth like I was told to do, it never it still happens. 2) My skin dries extremely easily. The very thought of running in the dry cold air makes the area of my nose start to flake. 3) It's fucking cold out.

But nay, I disregarded all my better senses and went jogging, first saying I was going to just run around the block and maybe to campus and back. But the one thing about me is I get competitive, and more so with myself. I see somewhere else, I'll be like, well, you can run there and it won't be too much farther. Then when I realize how much farther it is, I use scare tactics on myself, calling myself a pussy and saying you'll never be a good son. You know, mental tactics that a horrible father would say to his son, thus making me press on. It's really the reason I'm not laying in a bed at 350 lbs right now.

So I'm nearing the end of my run and then I feel it. My organs sometimes give me up to a four minute maximum warning time when it's time to head to the bathroom. This is usually fine since I just get up and take a break from work and do my business. This time it gave me a max time of 2.3 minutes and I was staring at a hill that I don't even like walking up. It's a huge bitch of a hill that is perfect for sledding and that's about it. Little kids probably have a name for it like "Devils Ditch" or "The Great Schism." And here I was, trying to peddle my fat feet up it knowing that at any moment I was going to start one of my most feared things in life: Shitting my pants.

Now if you've never been chased by a ravenous beast or never saw a person you didn't like and had to get out of sight real fast, let me enlighten you on something about running. It's all about contraction on the lower part of your body, for example, your stomach. That is why you never see a runner with too big a beer belly. It gets your abs going. It makes the muscles contract. And what other act involves contracting? Yep, shitting. The harder I pushed up the hill, the more I thought I was going to shit my pants. I even had a fail safe place I could have popped behind a tree and let it drop, but it was in a cemetery. And the last thing I want to do given my luck these days is desecrate on some sort of old mob boss who will later come back to get me.

So I pushed on, and pushed in. Just hoping. When I got back to my apartment, I ran for the door....and ran into it. I had forgotten I locked the bottom door and threw my keys into the bush I always throw them in. I searched frantically for them like there was a killer after me and all I had to do was get in the door and I would be safe. So when I finally found them and got the key in the door, which seemed like it took me 5 or 6 tries due to how cold and nervous I was, I booked up the steps, most likely waking up my roommate on the couch, who sleeps in intervals of 10 min of sleep, 5 min of awake, busted through the door and made it JUST in time. It was the sweetest shit I've ever taken. Better than that one on our family road trip up to Maine.

I think the reason for this alarming scare was due to the fact that my body is smart. It was used to just sitting around and relaxing. It's like a 10 year old who has to go back to school after an awesome summer of baseball and ice cream. My muscles were in no way ready to get back to work, so as I was punishing the muscles through working out, they were going to punish me by making me shit my pants.

I won muscles. Eat it. Eat shit!

1 comment:

Steven Freitas said...

HAHAHA this is definitely hilarious, and has happened to me on numerous occasions.

only you, mike miller, could turn the tragic event of possibly shitting ones pants into a humorous tale.