Robservations: Thoughts from the treadmill
If you’re a regular visitor to this space on Fridays, you’ll recall about six weeks ago, when your friendly neighborhood sports editor embarked on a mission to improve his rather expansive physique.
As of this writing, I’m happy to report, there have been a few positive results. If you look really closely, you can see those results. Feel free to compliment me at your leisure.
But while the pounds aren’t melting off with great ease, the random Robservations found around the gym and while staring at my less-than-ample meals these days are coming in by the truckload.
• Right off the bat, let me get something off my chest.
If you are in peak physical shape, yet you work out to stay healthy and maintain your condition, you should be commended.
You should also find your own special place or time to work out — away from us tubby types who are watching and hating you.
Have you ever been on a treadmill, with sweat dripping into your eyes and your shins and calves screaming in agony, only to look to the next machine and watch a 100-pound, tight-as-a-drum physical specimen running beside you? At three times your speed? For an hour? While talking on a cell phone and not even gasping for breath?
Trust me, that could be my best friend, my sister, my mom, anybody — and I would wish harm on that person. Not because they’re bad people, but just because that’s the way my mind works while my body is hurting. They’re in shape, I’m not, and it makes me mad at them.
So don’t take it personally, but if you felt I was describing your workout a few paragraphs ago, please realize all the out of shape people in the gym with you are silently picturing themselves suddenly stopping that treadmill, and watching it fling you over the handlebars.
• Secondly, I’m all for having high self-esteem, but even my own high opinion of myself has its limits.
So if I reach every physical goal I’ve set for myself, and become a lean, muscular figure of a man, do me this favor. If you ever see me walking around like some of the bodybuilder types I see in the gym, just slap me — hard.
You’ve seen them. They’re all “bowed-up,” with their chests poked out, and their arms held out to their sides like they’ve got some kind of rash in their pits. They’re always popping their necks and flexing, and grunting to each other about how many reps they do.
Yes, guys, you look very fit. Nice job, we’re all impressed. Now put some clothes on.
And how about a spritz of Right Guard while you’re at it?
• Finally, I’ve got to share the wisest thing my workout buddy Big Leonard ever said to me. It came to him a week or two ago, while we both were sweating and aching our way through another afternoon of treadmill torture.
“If it was as hard to get fat as it is to get thin,” he remarked, “I’d weigh 16 pounds.”
He’s never been more correct in his life.
If you had to work, sweat and ache to get out of shape, the way you have to in order to get back into shape, there would be no need for gyms, bow-flexes, Subway diets, Stacker 2, or any of that stuff. We’d all weigh — at the most — a sandwich or two more than we did the day we were born.
But if that was the case, what would this column have been about?