Five simple steps to looking like an idiot

1)      Be 49

2)      Take up jogging

3)      Run as slowly as grandma

4)      Run like you’re going to stop any minute

5)      Look as pained as if you’re Prometheus*, having your liver torn out by a giant eagle.

Lately, life has thrown me a very humbling curve ball. I went to see a life coach, and he challenged me to take up jogging – he had the cheek to say I wasn’t doing enough aerobic exercise! I knew I'd walked strenuously every day for 20-30 years. I knew I was fit. Why did I need to do more?

The very next morning, I started jogging. When I say “jogging”, I ran down the last hill, five minutes before my house. And it just about killed me. My heart pounded like a baby alien trying to claw its way out of my chest. I felt I couldn’t breathe, and strange fat on the outside of my thighs—that I never knew existed—shook and juddered as if my legs had taken on a life of their own. Turns out I wasn’t as fit as I thought I was which actually came as a shock.  My ego was hurt. When I reached home, at last, I was honest-to-goodness sweating and my face was beetroot! The whole thing was an exercise in embarrassment.

 

(Keep smiling becomes my mantra) 

 

A few days later, I added another downhill slope, despite the fact that every added step made me feel how tired and old my body had become. All pride I'd ever felt about my years of exercise fell away. Who knew running was so hard?

Next, I added a stretch of flat road. To run any further was pushing me to my absolute limits, especially the first ten minutes of punishment, when I never knew from one minute to the next if I’d be able to keep going. From a bird’s eye view, I saw myself faltering along the sidewalk like an old woman, taking tottering little steps. I'd get home, drenched in sweat and my face like a plum.

Jogging, I decided, was pure torture. But I’d been challenged! There was no way I could back out.
 

 

                                                  (Keep smiling, dagnabit) 

A few weeks passed, and I added another flat stretch and downhill run. I still took mincing steps, still thought I was going to die the whole way, and still came home covered in sweat, my face too-red.

It takes a lot to become aerobically fit, apparently. Stupid jogging.

Chalk up two months of adding a yard of distance every day, and I’m at the point now where I only have to walk the very steepest part of the uphill sections. I run the rest of the way. So that's progress. I still come home covered in sweat and my face carrot. However, I can truthfully say to my life coach now that, I’m a jogger. I’ll keep to myself the fact that I’ve never felt so tragically old or pathetic.

However, I'm assured running is good for me. So I shall persevere!

 

                   (My gran always used to say, 'give away your smiles, they're free')
 

Have you ever tried jogging? Love or hate running? I'm definitely in the 'not sure' camp....

See ya in the funny papers!

Ttl,
Yvette :-)

 

*Prometheus was a Titan who Zeus punished by chaining him to the Caucasus Mountains. Prometheus had to suffer having a giant eagle tear chunks out of his liver every night only to have the liver magically re-grow every morning, so that Prometheus’s punishment was never-ending.