Evens Out

I can't run any more.  Haven't been able to run much for the past year.  So, of course, I do other things--like eat and drink more.  Or worse.  And, again, "of course," I've put on weight.  Panicked at my newfound waistline, I decided I needed to do something.  I diet, though I have always watched what I have eaten and the only things to cut out are the bottles of beer and wine and scotch and the ice cream sandwiches after dinner.  In the past, I could always just run some extra miles to make the pounds melt more quickly.  Now, I need a new plan.

I decided to start walking in the mornings a good distance, perhaps thirty miles a week.  That should be enough, I rationalize, to get my metabolism going.  But walking isn't the same as running, I can tell.  I am now part of "The Clan."  That is how I have come to think of the walkers I see in the early morning light swinging their arms in big, loopy motions as they take their power strides.  They walk in pairs or groups smiling and chatting.  And they are almost all overweight.  It scares me, really.  For all the claims about how walking is good for your health, you might not think so if you came along with me at dawn.  For the most part, I am not as big as they are yet (though my thighs have begun to rub together and to chafe if I wear only the tricot liners sewn into running shorts--yikes!), but a thought came to me today.  These are people, perhaps, who have never worked out in their lives, people who have never thought about the nutritional value of foods, who didn't know an amino acid from a carbohydrate.   Now, I thought, they have read a diet book and tell one another over salads and sparkling water at lunch how they have quit drinking colas from sixty-four ounce mugs with plastic straws in them.  "Do you know how many calories are in one of those things," I imagine them saying breathlessly.  "Oh! My! God!"

I, on the other hand, will lose all will-power and take to binge drinking and consuming pound after pound of chocolate to help me fight depression.  In a few months, I think, they will twitter to one another as I waddle by saying, "what happened to him?"

Cruel fate.  I should know better than to worry about things like this, however.  It all evens out in the end, I guess.  I'll let you know.