jogging

(originally posted 8/30/2012)

Don’t kid yourself. I might write young but I am old as fuck. With that in mind I decided to start jogging again. Last year I went on a fitness kick and it lasted until the temperatures dipped below 50 so maybe it’s just the time of year, but I rummaged through the ol’ closet and located my jogging shoes and then spent the better part of three days putting together a ‘soundtrack of suffering’ on my Ipod so I would have something to get me through the 30 minutes of pain.

There are a lot of ways I could spin this story but I prefer an honest review of the incidents that made up my attempt at self-improvement, so I will proceed with that approach.

Just like in real estate the three most import things to remember before starting off on a jog are stretching, stretching, stretching. A healthy dose of good intentions doesn’t hurt either. I will now relate why I started off so poorly.

1. I bought knee braces. Not a problem in and of itself, in fact a very logical decision based on my history of sore knees. The problem was that I bought Large knee braces based on the fact that I am tall as fuck. BUT the size of knee braces is based on the girth of your knee and not the length therefore, because I am skinny as fuck, they kept sliding off my knees and down my legs.

2. The button on the flap of my underpants had come off. Usually no big deal, I would estimate that a full 50% of my underwear is missing a button, but in this case for some unknown reason my dick kept popping out as I ran and then it would wedge itself between my underpants and my sweat pants. I wasn’t sure what was more difficult to deal with; the why it kept doing it or the how. Either way it felt weird as fuck with my penis bouncing up and down in the little underwear doorway, the head of which was being raked up and down on the inside of my sweatpants.

3. My left ear must not be as deep as my right because although the right earpiece of my Ipod was nestled happily in my ear canal the left ear piece kept popping out and swinging back and forth across my face.

All three of these events started about ten feet into my run and continued relentlessly until I stopped my run.

Now I could play this off as some funny thing that is completely unbelievable and have you thinking I am making this up for your amusement but the terrible truth is that it happened and I couldn’t have looked like a bigger retard jogging down the path trying to pull up each knee brace nonchalantly while trying to grab the little wire holding the earpiece at the same time the tip of my dick was being filed down in the crotch of my pants. Anyone who has ever tried to wrangle his hose back inside his underpants while jogging and doing the aforementioned activities can commiserate.

It did not start out well. Worse 30 yards of my life.

So I stopped to regroup. Take inventory. Pull it together.

In doing so I got to look around a bit and see what else was going on in the park. Fortune had smiled upon me because it appeared nobody had been witness to ‘the show’ I had put on. I walked back to my car to make some changes. On the way I saw the strangest thing. A big fat woman trying to jog with her dog. The problem was she had a big fat dog. I swear, she had every intention of jogging. She kept trying to start but every time dogzilla would just stand there and she would be tugging helplessly on his/her leash and the dog would just sit there. I got so enraged. Here she was, trying to change her life for the better, run off a few pounds and start down the road to a thinner future and this piece of shit dog was too lazy to help! There should be a show called The Biggest Loser Dog, this fuck would be voted off the island the very first weigh-in. Poor woman kept tugging and the dog kept being fat and neither of them were making any progress. Maybe the saddest thing I’ve ever laughed hysterically at.

Somehow I ended up inspired so I stripped off the knee braces, grabbed a safety pin from the car to shut the downstairs barn door, and then smashed the earpiece of the Ipod so far down into my ear canal that I will probably need surgery to remove it.

It was time to jog (again).

It started to dawn on me after a few minutes of running that it’s not so much that I enjoy listening to music as much as it is that I am afraid to be alone with my thoughts. Originally I thought it was the sound of my feet crunching on the pavement that somehow made me more cognizant of the fact I was actually jogging and, therefore, made my legs and lungs aware of what they were doing and, more therefore, made them revolt and want to turn the metaphorical ship back to port where they could sit and watch TV, but it turns out I just have to have some distraction from the stupid shit that is running through my head at all times of peace and quiet. As long as the music played I wasn’t thinking and could plow along without much problem but if I was to take away the soundtrack I would be forced to actually pay attention to myself.

So obviously I got offended at this notion and immediately turned off the music that I had so carefully selected for my journey of 30 minutes.

Quickly thereafter I thought about how the Air Force could dramatically lower the number of planes that were shot down during wars… they could just taxi to wherever they were headed. The whole way. Never leave the ground. Nobody would suspect it. Just drive up, drop off their bombs and then drive away. Nobody gets shot down. Not one of them.

Brilliant.

I turned the music back on. Obviously.

Heeding some advice given to me by one of my annoyingly fit friends, the kind of friend that competes in Ironman competitions where, if memory serves, they have to run 26 miles, swim upstream like a fucking salmon for 26 miles and then carry a flaming piano up three flights of stairs on a unicycle or something. So fit they annoy you. But anyway, I lamented to them about my sore knees some time last summer, when I was trying to get back in shape for the 20th time in my unfit life, and they suggested (in a completely non-condescendingly tone that made me even more pissed) that I run on grass as opposed to pavement. Made a lot of sense so I slipped of the trail and started to run next to it.

Much better.

I felt very relaxed and the burning in my lungs had died down to just the feeling of having swallowed a mixture of jalapeño sauce and liquid fire. Captain Health out for a stroll.

So inspired was I that I left the comfort of the trail entirely and suddenly sprinted out into adjacent field. It was awesome. My spirit soared as I crashed through grasses and flowering plants of every make and model. It was the flowering part that was in the end my undoing. Apparently I was not the only living thing enjoying the blooms because I quickly became aware of how upset these fellow creatures get when you gallop through their flowers while they are gathering nectar or whatever fuck else they are doing. I looked down at my legs to see numerous flying insects clinging to them, all ready to lodge a complaint simultaneously.

Which, almost on cue, they did.

The image of me running with my knee braces slipping, my junk popping out my underpants and my ear piece swinging wildly in my face was nothing compared to the sight of my exit from the field. Shrieking and flailing as every bug sporting a stinger had made their way to my legs and had begun doing their best work. My legs were covered, it was a writhing mass of insects (and I swear I saw a crow in the mix) all convinced that the only way to save the nest or hive or whatever else they called home was to stick the living fuck out of me.

Then I saw them.

Twins.

Twin old men.

Both about as eccentric as you can imagine. But before you start in imagining them give me a sec to help out a bit. Balding with white hair and big bushy mustaches. Normal shorts and shirts, normal for Bavaria anyway, and socks pulled up to their knees that can only be described as lederhosen. Honestly I have no idea what lederhosen are but they looked like what I would think they are. Big thick crème-colored socks.

I know, I know. You imagined them much more eccentric. That’s what I get for stating it too much like a challenge.

Anyway, they were suddenly just there in front of me and they were so odd that for a brief moment I forgot all about my painful legs and just sort of nodded at them. They looked me up and down and then nodded back. Their eyes slowly made their way down to my legs as if to say “doesn’t that hurt?” I raised an eyebrow as if to say “you have no fucking idea.”

They both smiled broadly, pulled their socks down around their shoes as low as they could go and, I am not making this up, sprinted into the very field I had just departed. My face must have been a picture of pure disbelief as I slowly craned my head and watched them, knees high, plow through the very blossoms and their guests that I had recently disturbed.

As I slapped, crunched and flicked the last of my winged adversaries off my lower extremities I listened to them howl and laugh as they were similarly assaulted.

Even the middle-aged guy with the metal detector combing the area under the swings (what the fuck does he think he going to find????) couldn’t distract me from watching them until they returned. The three of us stood and silently compared the throbbing and swollen wounds on our legs.

One of them said “same time tomorrow?”

I nodded.

No pain, no gain. So now I sit here re-doing my Ipod trying to figure what music goes with getting stung.

Don’t say “anything by Sting.” Just don’t.