Sunday, January 6, 2008

Day Two

I'm posting back-to-back, so if you have not read about the first day yet, read this first.

This morning I woke up early again, still tired and without enough sleep, but I couldn't fall asleep. So I got going kind of early, wasted some time, kissed Tiff goodbye, and walked through the cold rain to go workout alone by maybe 8:30. That's dedication.

What I failed to mention - I alluded to it - in the last post was that our tiny little gym with its falling apart equipment is run by our apartment complex, home of, I'm guessing 1500 people. It's actually pretty cool that they have anything, I guess, and the price is right too. We gave them a $20 when we moved in to use it, and we get that back when we turn in the exercise room key when we move out. But keep in mind that the place is small and, even if it's just the Tiff and I, we have to pull straws to figure out who's using what machine.

I was hoping for a quiet workout. Go in, do my thing, and leave. Ideally, I would see nobody. Boy, was I wrong. Three people were already in there, probably all with the same idea of avoiding people as me. Not to be deterred I turned around and went back outside, and I started running.

I was running in the cold. I was running in the rain. It felt good I was running again. I used to run for awhile in college. I got to the point where I enjoyed it and looked forward to it, so I liked that I still could run pretty strong. I was confident. I would run through the apartment complex, maybe through the next-door neighborhood, and return to the exercise room to do at least some time on the elliptical, and maybe even some weights. I had it all planned out.

About a hundred yards later, I was huffing and puffing and rethinking my plan. I ran, well, slowly jogged through the apartment, cut out the neighborhood piece, and lapped around to the exercise room in about 15 minutes, still thinking I would try to spend some time in the exercise room, if nothing else to at least warm up. It was about at this point that I realized I had lost my $20 key.

I had put it in my sock to run, which looking back on it, doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I hated myself by now. I hated the cold, and the rain. My ear started to hurt like the time Tiff and I climbed Stone Mountain in the rain about this time of year. I was not happy. I slowly plodded along, and maybe a quarter of the way around, I found my key at the bottom of a large puddle.

I'm not sure why, I guess pure determination, I returned to the exercise room which now had a few more people. It was more crowded than I have ever seen it. Needless to say, I came home, wet, sweaty, cold, and with an ear ache. While day one went well, day two went not so well. Oh yeah, I was only out for about 35 minutes, but it counts as a full day. It shouldn't in the future, but today, I'm counting it. Only 206 left.

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