Treadmill

I've been getting more and more paranoid every time I go the gym. Why does the girl next to me keep looking over at me puffing away on my treadmill? Is she clocking my mile? I'll go faster.
WHY IS SHE STILL LOOKING OVER is this a race? Is that what you want, a race? FINE LET'S DANCE.Five minutes later, I'm the better person cause it takes two to tango and I'm Buddha and I quit.

I was talking out my gym habits with my boyfriend, various insecurities, why people feel the need to be soooooo competitive on gym equipment when they already have firm, supple asses; how much I love the pop punk and TOP-40 channels on those little tvs in front of my treadmill and how the person who invented those tvs should be awarded a Nobel for making my life better; how sometimes I get so into those wacky Beyonce videos I want to start dancing and mumble-singing.

Matt put the pieces together quickly.
Matt: "Do you do those things?"

Me: "Yeah I guess sometimes I just get so into the musi-"

Matt: "That would explain why people stare at you then."


This only heightened my anxiety about others judging my treadmill activities. Until today.

Myself, I says, TODAY WE RUN. WE MAKE UP FOR SIX DAYS SPENT WATCHING WHEEL OF FORTUNE WHILE CRAFTING DREAMS OF $12,400 AND A NEW NISSAN. I hang my towel over the the front-part that tells me how far and fast I'm going, and I tuned into "modern contemporary" (I'm not kidding) for about five songs and just ran. Yes, okay, I put the treadmill speed like .2 slower than normal cause I was serious about not walking.

So 20 minutes later I get all cocky and am like soooo excited to see my 3.6 miles (I got fixated on that number for whatever reason, 3.6 would be acceptable and cause an easy and un-sweaty victory of the proposed 7 ).

1.6.

SHUT THE FRONT DOOR. 1.6 miles?!?! So then I'm all, YOU TRICKED ME. SCREW YOU GYM, SCREW YOU HOT CHICKS ON STAIRMASTERS FOR TWENTY MINUTES THAT IS SUPERHUMAN, SCREW YOU TREADMILL, SCREW YOU BEYONCE.

I pouted for another mile but then that Fall Out Boy song came on with the line from Closer (which makes me be all "ooooo I know where that line is from" and shiver with superiority whenever I hear it) and the monkey and Kimmy K in the music video...and I just snapped. From the humiliation inflicted upon me by my treadmill, to the judge-y chicks in really nice-looking spandex who rarely sweat which seems unfair, to the musical equivalent of black-tar heroin coursing through my veins, my brain just snapped.

From now on, Chad is me and I am Chad and no hot girl with a unnatural, and, I might add, frankly unnerving, ability to climb stairs can make me feel bad.

Brief Interviews With the Laziest Person Ever.

I would like to begin with a Brief History of My Athleticism. It is a many varied story, with twist and turns and failure and triumph; however, and if they made a movie out of it, it would be nothing like Bend It Like Beckham, and not because of the obvious.

Let’s begin by sport:

SOCCER
In third grade, I absolutely killed at soccer. I wore shorts to school every day with a proud ADIDAS on the bottoms, and stashed my lip gloss in my training bra, which soccer allowed me to refer to as a “sports bra” for anyone curious. At recess, I was the only girl who was allowed to play with all the boys once they learned I made a fantastic goalie and didn’t cry when I got hit in the face. (I did. Just in private in my fort ten minutes later. It seriously hurts to take a soccer ball to the face.) I was going to try out for the fabled Phantoms team, the best private team you could be on as a kid, because their jackets were kick ass: blue, red, white (patriotic) with a PHANTOM playing SOCCER on the back (supernatural meets sporty).
This brief stardom as New Hampshire’s premier girl goalie ended before it began because my mom realized she didn’t own a minivan and didn’t want to shuttle me to practice constantly.
GRADE: A+ for effort, F for ultimate failure.

FIELD HOCKEY
Who knows why I took up field hockey in eighth grade (probably my first interest in butts, which I’ll get to later), but I bought a stick and wore a kilt and unlike every other foray into sports in gym thus far, in which I was often taken out due to complete ineptness, I succeeded. I was shooting at nets and dribbling around ankles and trotting to corners and the whole thing. I loved team sports for a few, brief months.
Then I skipped a year due to a paralyzing fear of high school, and went back to it sophomore year only to find I had gone through the final agonizing push of puberty. Also I popped my hip out.
GRADE: gangly.

YOGA
My mother is a yoga teacher. She’s strong, lean, capable. Why not me too? This worked very well for awhile; I’d leave each Ashtanga class junior year of high school relaxed, feeling centered and strong. Then I just…stopped.
The Andersons have a running joke about their insistence to avoid everything that makes them healthy, happy, and not addicted to something. Why not me too?
GRADE: C

RUNNING
I ran cross country in fifth grade because my Uncle Bob and my father had both been fantastic runners. (WHY NOT ME TOO.) I wore black socks to practice, and each meet my coaches would gently tell my mother that sometimes the slowest runners, with the hardest work, could become like all the other kids too. Unlike those other suckers, however, I am a creature of habit.
This began my career as a runner going the approximate speed of a grandmother riding a tortoise. However, this has been the one sport that has stuck. as I struggle through each excruciatingly slow and embarrassingly sweaty run ending in tomato-face, I wonder: why on earth am I still doing this? Why does anyone who sucks so bad at something still do it? Why?

Because I want an ass, that’s why.

And so, in one of my first and potentially biggest attempts to do something scary, I signed up for the Philadelphia Marathon. It’s fucking expensive. Like I could’ve adopted a fully spayed or neutered kitten who’s up-to-date with their shots instead of signing up for this. But what’s scarier than running a race that killed the first runner to complete it on the spot?