Residual Damage

I forgot to mention one other side effect of Saturday’s  infamous and ill-advised walk.  I felt like I had fluid in my ears. I was completely unwired on the way to breakfast, but on the way back, I needed all the help I could get, so I listened to podcast after podcast.  Yes, I had the volume turned up very high to drown out the traffic whizzing by me on Burnet, and then Guadalupe, but still.  By the time I got to my office and removed my headphones, I had a weird sensation in my ears, kind of like when your plane is landing.  Or after you get out of the pool and feel like you need to hop on one foot and shake the water out of your ear.  By the time I got home and laid down, it went away. 

Oh, and do I even need to mention my sunburn?  Which turned pretty quickly into a tan, but a darker one than I really look good or natural in. Of course I didn’t wear sunscreen, that would have been far too competent.

You would have been proud of me at the gym today.  I remembered everything, but had brought an unfamiliar set of ear buds, and for some reason they didn’t work.  An hour on a treadmill without music or Terry Gross. Disheartened, I kept bargaining with myself:  I’ll do 30 minutes on the treadmill, combine that with the .8 miles to and from the gym, and then go home and walk Banks 45 minutes.  Okay, I’m at 30, let’s see if I can hang in there another ten minutes.  Then another ten.  And finally I got over the hump and just committed to the treadmill.  I was inspired by the walkers – perhaps I should call them climbers – around me.  I thought I was doing well when I had the incline jacked up to 10.  The guy on my left had his on 24!  And he wasn’t even holding onto the rails beside or above him!  The woman on the other side of him had hers on 20.  So I did an interval of five minutes at level 15, and then towards the end of the walk, went all the way to 20.  Sometimes, when I have it going really fast, or up high like that, I’m reminded that there is very little margin for error.

Have you ever seen anyone fall off a treadmill?  I have, twice, at the gym I used to go to, and what can I tell you?  It’s pretty funny.  First there’s a pratfall, accompanied by a scream, and then the person shoots off the rear of the treadmill, and then they crash into the wall behind them.  The only reason it was funny, of course, was because they didn’t get hurt.  And then we all hurried over to help them, making appropriately sympathetic inquiries, all the while biting our tongues to keep from laughing. I do NOT want to be that person.