Dangers Inherent in Exercise

Ok, so one of the selling points for my apartment complex is that it is connected to a series of trails that, according to the manager, run all the way around the lake. So in one of my fits of crazy, I decided that I was going to start making a habit out of exercising (a concept so foreign to me that I literally just had to use the spell check function in Outlook in order to type the word properly).

My plan was to find the pair of rollerblades that I had purchased from (and I’m not making this up) the very first store in the world to ever carry rollerblades (it’s in Uptown near lake Calhoun where they were invented), and take a leisurely skate around the lake.

Now, remember, I’ve been on rollerblades once before in my life. It was on the day that I bought them, 8 years ago. I took them straight from the store to a parking lot by Lake Calhoun, tied them on, and proceeded to endure the most excruciating 45 minute long quarter mile of rollerblading in the history of shoes or wheels. Upon returning to my car, I tied the laces together, and promptly took them straight home to be stored in a closet where, like a naughty pet, they haven’t been allowed out since.

But none-the-less, THIS was a good idea.

So, with my blades in tow, I walked downstairs in my socks to find the entrance to this path. I sat down on the curb in front of my apartment and laced up (yes, my rollerblades had laces, unlike any model made after the Carter administration which now all have those snappy strap thingies – technical term, try to keep up).

And off I go, like a giraffe on an ice rink, legs all a-wobbly, knees pressed together, arms out, terror in my eyes, and head around the corner toward the path. Unfortunately, between the front door and the path’s beginning there's a hill. Well, I use the word “hill” here pretty loosely. It’s, at best, a slight downcline. In fact, I’m pretty sure that if you put a superball down on it, it wouldn’t roll. Put a 225 pound moron on deathskates on it, however, and he can break the sound barrier within 7 seconds.

This is where I took my first digger.

Realizing that I was picking up speed at an alarming rate, and simultaneously that I had no idea how to stop, or even slow down, I had to choose between making a controlled exit on to the grass on my right, or in to the thicket of pine trees in front of me. I chose the grass, though the caravan full of teenagers driving by seemed to find either option equally funny.

So there I sat, literally 35 feet from my front door, re-examining my decision making process. “This is clearly a bad idea,” I thought, wisely, “I should just pack up and go home.” But no, I was determined. I have given up on everything, and a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step and all that crap that you read on posters with pictures of eagles and whatnot, so F it, I got back up, turned my skates sideways, and side-stepped down this “hill” 4 inches at a time. At the bottom, thankfully, it flattened out for the foreseeable future, and I felt confident that I had made the right decision. So I pressed my knees back together and, with all the confidence of a teenage boy at his first formal dance, I began down the path.

From there things got better…for a while. I made it about 300 yards without spilling or screaming, and felt as though I was beginning to regain all of the expertise that I had developed eight years ago on the banks of the Calhoun. Then obstacle number two presented itself – a cute girl with her dog were walking along up ahead of me (truth is, I don’t know if she was cute or not, but for the sake of the story and to express the degree of embarrassment that I am about to admit to, let’s assume she’s Cindy Crawford). Now, my particular skating style is not one that is forgiving of sharing a path. With all of the muscle control of a newborn baby calf, I would amble back and forth across the path three or four times for every foot I moved forward. Add to that my arms, spread wide for balance, and I could easily have taken up a whole second path, had one been presented to me.

Nevertheless, I was moving faster than Cindy and her Golden Retriever, so a passing event was imminent. I timed my sways perfectly so that I could be moving right to left as I came up on her, then back from left to right as I passed her, and I DO IT!!! OMG!!! I’M THE BEST ROLLERBLADER EVAR!!!

So happy, I am, with my perfectly executed pass that I forget what I’m doing, stub a skate, and take my second digger in to the weeds between the path and the lake. Cindy, very concerned, rushed up to help me, which posed a WHOLE new set of problems. I mean, if she got ahead of me again, I’d have to pass again, and since it was purely due to pure, dumb luck that I was able to get by her in the first place, I decided a hasty exit with a vague “I’m ok thank you…..” whispered in to the wind would better serve us both.

The next quarter of a mile went by relatively without incident (there was a flashing danger light as I passed a man walking while simultaneously turning off the concrete path on to a rickety, Indiana Jones style wooden rope bridge, but I was able to do it without falling or having my still beating heart torn from my chest by an Incan shaman (Kali Mah!!!).

The story begins again on the far side of the lake, just as my legs – which haven’t been asked to do anything more strenuous than lift my fat ass off a couch in roughly 6 years – are about to give out. There, returned with a vengeance, is the “hill” that I descended on my out of my apartment building except this time it goes up at what I can conservatively estimate was an 85 degree angle. Sherpas and rope ties are required to ascend this mountain, I swear to god. I have no chance. I have no momentum (it’s hard to generate momentum when 90% of your energy is spent staying upright and swaying from side to side) and even a good rollerblader would have to have prepared to round the corner and climb K-2. So I sit for a while and contemplate my options. Again, my wording here is generous – “options” indicate that I had more than one. So, one more time, I turn my skates sideways and begin to inch up toward the peak one tiny baby step at a time.

At the top, I notice that the terrain has changed. I’m no longer on a path. I’m in a residential neighborhood without so much as a sidewalk. I look back down the hill, and knowing that there’s no way to retrace my steps, I opt instead to lose my fucking mind. I start screaming at the top of my lungs, angry at God himself for allowing me to have lived all the way to age 29 without enough good sense to know that if he wanted us to have wheels on our feet he would have damn well put them there himself.

But again, I find myself without many choices. I plod on.

Down the street, around a corner, turning in directions that I have to hope lead back, generally toward my apartment. After a half mile of this, with every muscle in my body screaming at me (did you know that you had muscles below your ribs? And that they are vital to the act of rollerblading? Neither did I), I give up.

I collapse on to the front yard of some random person’s house and lay there, chest heaving, eyes staring blankly up at an unforgiving blue sky, and pray for death. The owner of the house, a nice middle aged white woman, comes running in to her front yard, sure that I’ve died on her lawn. “Oh my god are you ok!?!” she screams? Slowly, I turn up on on my side, favoring my lower rib muscles.

“I will pay you an obscene amount of money to drive me back to the Lake Susan Apartment building” I say. “I will write you a check, you will merely need to fill in any amount you desire.”

“Oh! Lake Susan?” she cheerily replies, “You’re almost there, it’s just right around the corner! You can cut through my lawn if you like!”

I didn’t have the heart to explain to her that even if it was “just around the corner,” as she had said, that I still didn’t have the strength to make it. But I’m a man, and I’m lying in a stranger’s lawn, and I am bound by the laws of ManLawnLayersLocal #438, of which I am a dues paying member, to get up and accept her courtesy.

So I cross her lawn, head over a patch of twigs that took no small amount of skill to navigate, down yet another hill, and on to highway 101, which I finally recognize as the patch of highway a good mile PAST my goddamned apartment building. At this point I’m wondering if one can die from rib-muscle trauma.

But no! My dominating spirit resumes, and I skate up the highway like a champion heading down the final stretch toward home. Until the sidewalk ends, and is replaced by 2000 feet of mud and rock, combined in a pattern designed specifically to break the ankles of would be rollerbladers.

Finally defeated, I sit down again and look out at the stretch of ground that represents my final defeat. It has won. I have nothing left.

With a sigh, I bend over to unlace my skates. One by one, I take them off, and like before, 8 years ago in the back of my Honda, I tie the laces together. But this time no such enviable fate as closet storage awaits these instruments of medieval torture. No. No more. I get up, socks pulled high in defiance of the Lord, and drop my rollerblades on to the ground next to the mailbox of whatever house’s lawn I was now standing on, and proceeded to walk myself home, in the mud, free of the burden of ever wanting to exercise ever again.

And there they sit, to this day as far as I know, and the muddy footprints in my closet will forever serve as a reminder – never again.