The Treadmill Queen

In school I used to dread P.E. time. I was one of those weird freakazoid kids who was homeschooled, and since I was being educated by an educator from a long line of educators and school administrators, we weren’t allowed to do any of those stereotypical things homeschoolers get laughed at for, like:

SCHOOL IN PAJAMAS

ICE CREAM BREAKS

FIELD TRIPS TO AMUSEMENT PARKS.

Nooo…. everything about my schooling experience carefully matched Real School: pledge of allegiance at 8, fifteen-minute break at 10:15, and Phys Ed from 3:00-3:30. It was the longest half-hour of my life. My siblings used to tease and say that I was just a fan of The Great Indoors, and that I’d rather sit on the couch curled up with a journal than physically dazzle everybody on the soccer/football/baseball/whatever “field” our lawn was that day. That was technically true, but it had nothing to do with laziness: I was just very self-aware, and WHEN I DO PHYSICAL ACTIVITIES I AM SERIOUSLY THE MOST AWKWARD PERSON IN THE WORLD.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I am SO thankful that I was homeschooled, and I had the opportunity to receive a quality of education that few people in America can even dream of. But when it came to mirroring the traditional educational model, couldn’t my otherwise extremely sensible parents have made some accommodations for my uncomfortable clumsiness? Apparently not: my darling mother faithfully herded her offspring into the backyard and everyone pretended not to notice when I became a blob of physical instability as soon as I left the back door.

I could PLAY things decently well; I could kick a soccer ball and I could kind of throw a football. (I could not, and to this day cannot, catch a softball.) But when I did played whatever game we were assigned that day, I had absolutely no ladylike elegance. It was a real life ugly duckling story.

So, now I am a secretary and all that, and I sit at a desk for most of my day, and it is the best job in the world. But I’m twenty five years old and my metabolism isn’t what it used to be, and I have no mom to use a cattle prod to get me outside every afternoon at 3:00, I need to be accountable to myself if I’m going to keep my girlish figure. Accordingly, I have resorted to working out at a gym for an hour a night after work.

I HATE THE GYM.

Let’s just say, I have not improved, in attitude nor grace, since the fifth grade. I used to run on the city streets after work, but my brother, who is in public service, would get a million calls within ten minutes of my run:

“WHAT WAS JANE DOING OUT THERE ON THE HIGHWAY? Was that running? Was it walking? Was it shuffling? We have never seen anything like it before! With all of that weirdness going on she had BETTER be carrying pepper spray; she’s going to get abducted by a creepy weirdo!”

So, yeah.  Majorly pleasant for my poor brother to get calls while at work concerning the inevitable kidnapping of his sister as a result of her awkwardness in exercise. Yeah, so, like I said, I’ve resorted to working out at the gym. And…. I hate running. I am just….I have no style. I really can’t stay on a treadmill without activating the emergency shutoff mechanism, dropping my iPhone, or getting my ear buds tangled up. It’s a disastrous nightmare.

Thankfully, when I work out, I AM ALONE, and that is the only reason I’ve stayed with this as long as I have. My coworkers go to our work gym in little clusters, but I have carefully timed my schedule so that when I’m there THE PLACE IS COMPLETELY DESOLATE.

One time I heard voices in the gym, and quickly turned on my heels and left before they could spot me because there was no way I was going to go work out in front of them. I’ve seen what I look like when I run, and you have to take my word for it that working out with them would destroy my credibility in the workplace. After that, I showed up home right after work, all decked out in cute gym pants and a ponytail, and was all, “WHADDUP, Family?! Just dressing down for a quiet evening at home!” They didn’t even ask.

Last week sometime, I was a hot, sweaty, disgusting mess and I had forty minutes of my hybrid walk/jog/run behind me, when the door to the gym made a sound and in walked an athletic coworker who rides his bike about one million miles per week, runs marathons, and regularly skips lunches to improve his physique in unspecified ways.

THIS GUY IS A BEAST.

I looked down at the treadmill speed. A cautious 4.8 mph, and my ear buds on my iPhone were untangled. My heart was thumping. I was trying to come up with some excuse to leave. Please go do something in the other corner of the gym! But he didn’t. He selected a treadmill next to mine, set it to match my miles per hour, and within a matter of seconds WE WERE JOGGING IN UNISON.

I was trying to think of a way out, but there was none. If I left then, I’d seem like a bizarre unsocialized female who didn’t want to be alone by herself in a gym at night with a man. So I kept up conversation, asking pointed questions designed to make him think and therefore stare at the ceiling instead of me, and we jogged on into the night.

Those twenty minutes just about killed me.