Run Joe, Run

I may not run far, and I may not run fast, but I run (nearly) every day. I’ve been doing it for quite awhile now. And though I may not have logged as many miles as Forrest Gump in the movie of the same name, I’ve probably logged enough to get me from home to the local cinema to watch "Forrest Gump." I’ll run the first mile then walk another at a brisk pace as a cool down. I’m at that age where fitness is foremost in my mind, and running improves not only my overall health and cardio fitness, but is a great mood booster too.

(Hey kids, you actually have to click the "continue reading" link for the rest of the story this time... )

I started running while Mercy and I were bunking with the Brain Trust. Stately Wayne Manor is just a stone’s throw from a lovely little park with a half-mile, concrete (ouch) trail, and it was there I first learned the joys of shin splints. Later I did my daily mile in a circuit around our vast apartment complex. I even kept up my routine on my little adventure out West. When I found myself back at the Tehuti Homestead, the first order of business was to mark out a mile route through the neighborhood.

I would run down to the end of the street, turn right and run past the Baptist church, past the elementary school I attended as a lad, make another right at the local hamburger joint trying to ignore the aroma of sizzling beef goodies, then run past the park and the fire station. After a few more twists and turns, running uphill and down, I would eventually arrive back home. There I would stagger up the driveway eyes bulging, side aching and panting for breath. My legs felt like I’d gone fifteen rounds with Tanya Harding. My run had become less about me tearing up the road than the road tearing up my legs. I felt certain that it wouldn’t be long before I wasn’t so much running as shuffling along like Ozzy Osborne. Oh the horror.

But then I got invited to make use of the facilities at the local senior citizen’s center-- and NOT because of my age. (I know how you people think.) They had a basketball court that was hardly ever used in the afternoons and my run took on a whole new life. Running on the springy wooden floor, over a smooth, level surface was like Heaven. My shins no longer hurt. My knees no longer felt like rusty coffee cans full of broken glass. I wasn’t gasping for air at the end of it and my sides weren’t splitting. I pushed my regimen from a single, painful mile to a mile run to running one and walking one. And though I won’t break any records, I’m doing an 8-minute mile. Not too shabby for a forty-year-old guy, I think.

It isn’t just running, either. My workout routine also includes a daily regimen of pushups, sit-ups, leg lifts, knee-ins, crunches and oblique crunches. I do seven sets of ten reps each, adding sets with each passing week. But a funny thing happened when I stepped on the bathroom scale. Even though my exercise level has increased, my weight went up instead of down—by ten pounds in a month, in fact. Unfortunately, it isn’t all muscle mass. My BMI tells the tale. BMI, Body Mass Index is a calculation of one’s humptiness derived by comparing one’s tallity to their fatitude. Mine was 30.4, which pushed me up the chart from merely overweight to behemoth. Gasp!

Could it be Mama Tehuti’s good old fashioned Southern cooking? Down here even the vegetables are seasoned with bacon grease. Or could it be that I generally consume enough calories to sustain your average sasquatch? Time to do a little damage control and take stock of what I’m putting in my mouth. That bag of tasty corn chips I love so much ought to have the skull and crossbones on it or at least a heart with a dagger through it. One serving has 130 calories, 50 of which are from fat. Do you know how big one serving is? Six chips! I can’t even taste six chips. The potpie that I thought was the healthier choice was 510 calories. That doesn’t seem so bad until you realize one potpie is considered two servings. So I should eat half and throw the other half out the window?

So here I sit eating baby carrots and looking at the nutrition label on the back of my beloved corn chips—tasty, tasty corn chips… Chiiiiiiiiips… Know how they say you can’t eat just one? They’re right. That’s how they get ya, the bastards. I guess it’s time to set the R. Lee Ermey alarm clock.

So it’s up every mornin’ at the crack of dawn,

Do a hundred pushups with my jammies on!

Who’s jammies?

My jammies!

Fat jammies!

Hoo! Ha!

Maybe I ought to add some new activities to my workout routine too. I found a cool little calculator that figures how many calories a man of my advanced years and expanding girth would burn for a wide range of activities. Running for ten minutes burns only 147 calories. Surfing the net for an hour burns 132 calories. If I take a minute to feed the cats I’ll burn four whole calories. Hammering out a blog entry will burn 264 calories over a span of two hours. How many Tehuties does it take to change a lightbulb? I don’t know, but they’ll burn 3 calories doing it. Kneeling in prayer and light sexual activity burn the same amount, 15 in ten minutes. Driving a forklift for eight hours a day burns a whopping 1,760—and you thought I was just sitting on my butt. Plug a few numbers in and see for yourself. You might be surprised at how many, or how few your favorite pastimes burn off.

Then feel free to join me in the gym. Don’t worry about those footsteps pounding up behind you. It’s just me running for my life.

In the Links-O-Crap that MSN thrusts into my Hotmail inbox, there was an article titled, "How Spacemen Lose Weight." Not quite "Atkins for E.T." is it?

Comments

[Rx]

I use to be quiet the Gump; back in my military days now I'm just 'ol Gumpy - thanks for the encouragement, "I need to get back to where I once belonged."

[Rx]

... and just a side note...Rx will be a grandpa come April, his little x will have her own "daughter"!!!

[RX]

http://
thenephilimage.
blogspot.
com/

I put a link to your site, as an EXAMPLE of the outstanding, quality reasons for staying pluged into the Matrix instead of waking up to those mundane things like the little barking dog under my desk driving me crazy to go outside.... wait a sec.....

[Little Blossom]

I'm not that far behind you...Mine is 28.2...I've cut out the sweets (until Mercy and I went shopping and stopped by the chocolate factories) and started and exercize routine that by far doesn't come near to yours and I think I gained weight too...Um, what's up with that shite?...Who makes these damn charts up anyways?...You have to be like sickly tiny to be at a "healthy" wait...Now ain't that some boochie shite?...BTW if you injure yourself from exercizing WAY TOO MUCH, I'll have to make a trip up to Brownwood just to kick your ass...Take it easy, don't add any more reps and don't add any more activities to your routine...I think you should take some of those activities and reps OFF your routine so we'll have a Tehuti left when you come back.

--Your Blossom

[T.D. Tehuti]

Trust me, Blossom, there will be enough of Ol' Tehuti to go around. Tehuti in abundance, as it were.

Thanks for the props, X. And congrats on the lower case x, too.