Destined for Exercise

It Sure Didn't Take Long

Dear Friends,

After obsessing over so many of my posts days before sitting to write them and then just winging it because I haven’t had a clear subject, I’ve broken my pattern.

No, I didn’t come up with a subject in advance for this post. For once, I didn’t have time to obsess!

This was a week.

In the past seven days, I was consumed by a few unexpected things, none of which will sound insane on their own but together contributed to more action than I could reasonably handle:

1) I visited my mom. I knew the trip to see my 88-year-old mother with dementia would take up most of my time. However, in addition to hunting down bananas of the proper ripeness and chocolate L’il Drums (an ice cream novelty for those who might not consume toddler-sized treats—or be lactose intolerant), I also had to take Mom to the urgent care for a mysterious ankle pain that arose before I’d even arrived. It turned out to be a chip fracture in a bone I’d never even heard of. Thankfully, Mom will be fine, in part, I think, because she has a high threshold for pain and doesn’t entirely comprehend what a talus bone is or that it has anything to do with the pain in her ankle. (This is when having dementia is a teeny-tiny bit of a blessing, by the way). Let me add that she wasn’t exactly running half-marathons before this small fracture. The boot on her foot might as well be a block of cement. Clearly, the boot manufacturer was not thinking about 88-year-olds with dementia when they designed it.

2) I spent a day at my college reunion. It was the first one I’d attended since graduation, which was a long time ago. (And no, I won’t reveal which one; I’ll only admit it wasn’t my 10th.) I actually had fun, which meant I wasn’t thinking about this post at all! Instead, I was marveling that many of us now wore fancy sneakers and designer handbags. As you may have guessed, I had neither, unless a well-worn pair of Brooks and a miniature backpack from Target count.

3) And the most unexpected news of all—good news! A reputable humor publication might now take a hit to its reputation because it plans to publish my very first humor piece. I’ll certainly send a note around at some point when it actually appears online. This kept me very distracted, though, not because of the euphoria but because I had to figure out how to use Medium during the visit to see my mom. Certainly better than taking Mom to the urgent care but nevertheless, a challenge in its own right.

Now, as some of you may recall, last week when I posted, I issued myself a challenge that I either had to write a post or work out, meaning, more specifically, that if I didn’t manage to write anything for my newsletter this week, I would have to force my lazy ass to do resistance training of the weight-bearing kind. I could probably cheat here because in a way, this might count as a post. In fact, I suspect many of you would forgive me if I called it that. I did write something AND I spared you the excruciating details.

But guess what? I’m not just going to list a few things that happened last week and pretend I’ve posted. That would be a cop-out because I arguably could have written an actual post about any one of these items.

So have to take the hit.

I have to do resistance training. Like today. No excuses. Especially to Coach Melanie, who read my post last week and wrote her own post intended to help procrastinators (or sloths, in my case) stop resist resistance training.

Wish me luck folks. Just don’t tell me to break a leg. I’ve already had one trip to the urgent care this week for a fracture. And if I break a bone, I’ll probably have to do PT and more resistance training, even if I manage to post next week.

Let’s take this one step at a time, okay?