I used to love running. Tearing down the street in my trainers with my walkman blasting, lungs feeling the burn, limbs surging with electric acidity, joints pulsing with the jolting glide, each step's impact a kiss from the pavement lifting me up as I carried myself forward like a beaming bride over the threshold of my own robust love of life! I loved it. Every night after work (I worked the 4 to 12 at an oceanfront restaurant which shall remain unnamed), I'd run home. Funny, I don't recall how I used to get to work, in those days.
Huh.
I wasn't having somebody drop me off. I sure didn't run to work - you can't be out on the floor tending to the customers all stank. Not when you're working for tips, you can't! And I sure don't believe I walked. That's a long-ass walk. Prohibitively long-ass.
Well, however I got to work, I sure ran home. I don't know how many miles it was, but I'd always play the same cassette on my walkman for the trip. It was like a really involved sonic mantra, and also an unvarying standard to measure myself against: Def Leppard's Hysteria. And by the time I was on peak form, I'd be flying effortlessly down the home stretch to the strains of that spiky, chunky guitar solo in "Armageddon It" - that's the mark I'd hit with regularity.
These days if I tried it, I'd doubt I could make the whole trip by the time "Excitable" came on. WEAK. Weak and gasping.
But I'd do it anyway. I would do it if I could, resume running. Unfortunately, my ability to do so is hampered if not occluded by my degenerative medical condition, of which I'd dimly been aware of my entire life (I guess) but which has only gotten worse since I stopped running. I'm sure there's some fancy Greco-Roman name for it, but in layman's terms it's called: lazy ass. You may have heard of lazy eye? Two very different conditions, in terms of specific morphology and etiology, yet a surprisingly good comparison can be drawn between the two. However, unlike "lazy eye" - which disproportionately affects only one of the body's eyes - lazy ass typically takes its toll on both buttocks equally. For this reason, wearing an eye patch on one or the other buttock has almost no effect (wearing a patch on both would of course be prohibitively futile - it would defeat the whole purpose underlying the eye patch treatment, which is to strengthen the one by weakening the other).
It's taken me a long time to come to terms with this, but I kind of have to face facts: I may never be able to get back into running again.
Huh.
I wasn't having somebody drop me off. I sure didn't run to work - you can't be out on the floor tending to the customers all stank. Not when you're working for tips, you can't! And I sure don't believe I walked. That's a long-ass walk. Prohibitively long-ass.
Well, however I got to work, I sure ran home. I don't know how many miles it was, but I'd always play the same cassette on my walkman for the trip. It was like a really involved sonic mantra, and also an unvarying standard to measure myself against: Def Leppard's Hysteria. And by the time I was on peak form, I'd be flying effortlessly down the home stretch to the strains of that spiky, chunky guitar solo in "Armageddon It" - that's the mark I'd hit with regularity.
These days if I tried it, I'd doubt I could make the whole trip by the time "Excitable" came on. WEAK. Weak and gasping.
But I'd do it anyway. I would do it if I could, resume running. Unfortunately, my ability to do so is hampered if not occluded by my degenerative medical condition, of which I'd dimly been aware of my entire life (I guess) but which has only gotten worse since I stopped running. I'm sure there's some fancy Greco-Roman name for it, but in layman's terms it's called: lazy ass. You may have heard of lazy eye? Two very different conditions, in terms of specific morphology and etiology, yet a surprisingly good comparison can be drawn between the two. However, unlike "lazy eye" - which disproportionately affects only one of the body's eyes - lazy ass typically takes its toll on both buttocks equally. For this reason, wearing an eye patch on one or the other buttock has almost no effect (wearing a patch on both would of course be prohibitively futile - it would defeat the whole purpose underlying the eye patch treatment, which is to strengthen the one by weakening the other).
It's taken me a long time to come to terms with this, but I kind of have to face facts: I may never be able to get back into running again.
Comments
I find any time I can work Def Leppard into a post, something magical almost always occurs.
Then the told me I wouldn't get a new kidney if I kept being one.
So I stopped.
I think it depends on your motivation.
@jorg: I wish I'd realized the futility of it before I bought these damn eye patches. Man.
There should be a pirate with two hook-hands, two peg legs and twin eyepatches. But he is the most dread pirate of all (next to Roberts)! Because he fights using zen senses like Zatoichi.
That might be a separate post. Even a doodeloo, potentially.
Even his beard is a prosthesis. It's made of tree bark. Barkbeard the Pirate!