January Gym Tales

Last night's trip to the gym was a comedy of errors of sorts.

First, with all the warm weather I forgot that it was in fact January. Which means, it's January at the Gym. That month where every New Year Resolver packs the gym for three weeks and then magically disappears as February begins. Generally I have much more annoyance for these twinks that have no idea what they're doing and clog up the machines for the rest of us. However, I have not exactly been a regular at the gym either of late so who am I to judge.

Then as I unpacked my gym bag that I packed the night before I realized I did not pack socks. I decided to go ahead and run. I've done this before with varying results. By the way, socks are the item I most commonly forget to pack. I headed out to the gym to scout out a treadmill. My favorite row of treadmills was full so I headed to the other row with TVs in front of them. There was one open treadmill. I headed over and discovered the treadmill next to it had one very tall, very cute man on it.

I began my run. After 10 minutes or so, I began to feel blisters forming on my feet. The prudent thing to do would have been to stop, do some weights, maybe ride the bike. But I didn't want Mr. Tall Dark and Handsome to think I was some January Johnny Come Lately so I fought through the pain. It got to the point where I thought maybe if I sped up, I would change my stride and put pressure on different parts of my foot. I sped up. It seemed to work, but soon I realized it just managed to pop said blisters. The pain was excruciating. Not to be deterred I sped up even more to finish my three miles as quickly as possible. As I sped up so did said cute stranger.

I finished the three miles. Usually I jog the remaining minutes to do a full 30 minutes. Not tonight. I slowed to a walk and walked (hobbled) my cool down. I slunk off my machine and limped over to the shelf to get the cleaning spray to wipe down my machine. When I turned around Mr. Tall Dark and Handsome had begun to walk himself. Now it was probably just a coincidence, but I hope that perhaps he was also trying to impress me and is feeling it a bit today.

The whole thing is just silly because I didn't even talk to him and now I have huge blisters, which is somewhat ironic considering that every family trip we took I was reminded that Calvin Coolidge's son died of blood poisoning after he played tennis without socks and got blisters. This usually came up as I tried to wear jellys or Birkenstocks or whatever fashion fad fell betwixt the two. I would reluctantly put on my tennis shoes and socks for a day of sight seeing. Well, at 34 I get it and my kids will also learn of Calvin Coolidge's son. These kids however will obviously not be with the cute stranger I ran next to last night.