“My body doth protest too much, methinks”. (Shakespearean-ish quote).
If I hate one people group it would be fit people. I don’t hate anybody, but if I did it would be them. I especially hate fit people who don’t try to pressure me to get fit because if I was them I would definitely be pointing out to everyone how fit I was and unfit they were.
Fitness would be right up my alley if it wasn’t so terrifically boring and hard. How is eating a cupcake so easy and pleasing and fast, but working off said cupcake requires countless repetition of very unpleasing exercises? It just doesn’t make sense.
“But you’ll feel so much better if you do!”
I feel pretty good eating cupcakes actually, so don’t try and trick me with a salad, I’ve tasted them and have been disappointed unless bacon was involved. Salad is, in fact, what food eats and one guy I used to work with shared a revelation with me when he said “I didn’t rise to the top of the food chain to eat salad”. The wisdom of his thinking was wise indeed, and it also agreed with my opinion so I didn’t look any further.
In recent years I’ve enjoyed playing soccer which makes a sort of sense to me in that I can chase something in order to kick it and hone my skills in trash talking my friends. It’s physical, emotional, and psychological and that’s exercise I can get behind! But running on a treadmill that will be staring back as insolently as ever the next morning…?
My older girls and I were shooting hoops yesterday and I discovered that it’s much harder than it looks and I’m much worse than I imagined. Both of these conditions are noisy killers of my willingness to exercise, but the noisiest was the sound my lungs were making trying to replenish parts of my body my brain had forgotten were there. At one point when I took the ball to half to renew my futile attack Arwen actually said to me “Are you talking a lot right now because you need a break?” It was perceptive and I was secretly pleased that my lessons in mind-games were sinking in, but it still hurt my feeling (singular).
Before I started shooting and attempting layups (and still had my confidence), I taught both of my girls a valuable lesson about sports. Sure I was a little hard on them with my opening line: “When you guys play ball, you’re not even trying to get into the other girl’s heads!! What’s wrong with you?” There’s no place in amateur sports for sportsmanship and I personally find it disgusting.
Arwen and Ailish just looked at each other knowingly with tiny smiles on their faces, which I took to be a growing respect for their dad’s sporting prowess, and then brutally beat me. I’m not saying I was losing gracefully either because I wasn’t. I may also have been fouling unnecessarily and constantly changing the rules and the score, but in the end it was worth it.
Not to me of course.
Today my back is sore and I’m smarting from the humiliation of losing to a couple of girls, but at least they’re happy. I’ve noticed a certain smugness that will carry them a long way at school and I’ll be the butt of their jokes, but I’m man enough not to care about what a bunch of kids think of me, unless I have to see them in the future ever. Ailish even started employing a tiny, sympathetic “Awww!” every time I missed, but she didn’t mean it. Actually, she meant it in exactly the way I taught it to her which was also hard to take.
It serves me right for trying to “get out and exercise”. You know what’s easier? Watching people getting paid large sums of money exercising on professional sports teams! They live with a lot of pressure that I think is unhealthy in many ways, so I’m thinking of starting Coaching For Already Fit People.
CFAFP will be the first of its kind and will find a much larger niche (pun intended) whereby the unfit can coach the fit back into the wisdom they once knew.
“No, I won’t go running today. If I don’t go running it is less likely I will be hit by a car, less likely I will be overtaken by an older couple out walking for the sheer joy of it, less likely I will return home exhausted and emotional from being out of shape, and less likely to require new shoes every month.” This is called responsibility people!
Or….. I’ll just have to get out a little more and quit eating garbage. Maybe that would be easier than all the excuses.
Now if only I can think of some new trash talk to give me the edge tonight…
COREY KOPE 