Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Fitness strategies for the desperate

It was, as many readers no doubt noticed, a cold winter in parts of the U.S. Was and is. While I'd been very good about running in the fall, when the ice arrived, and I couldn't alternate between the treadmill and running outside, it all kind of came to a halt. Various minor winter-blah illnesses further conspired to get me as out-of-shape as possible as quickly as possible. The prospect of a half-hour of guilt-free weekday sitcom consumption failed to cancel out the two frozen minutes' walk to the gym. Did I mention I've gotten very used to life with a car? 

So behold, my plans for battling running-inertia. 

-Make appointments to go running with friends in the area. This means keeping a mental - maybe even physical - list of who might want to do this, and being a bit more the organizer than I usually am. But seeing as all that needs to be organized is a time and place to show up in sneakers, I can probably handle it. 

-Announce to the aforementioned list that I am about to go running, not so much to go with people (people do tend to require notice) as to compel myself off the couch. There, the danger is in spamming my friends, but the chances of my doing this (the running or the emailing) often enough to constitute spam are low indeed. 

-Bring Bisou! Except I'm never quite sure this counts as exercise. With all the sniffing and marking, there's not much continuous jogging involved. But it has a certain undeniable two-birds-one-stone advantage.

-Save the better and longer podcasts for running, i.e. not for dog-walks. That would be Dan Savage, of course, or the Marc Maron interview with Lena Dunham. That would most definitely not be anything about recipes from NPR. 

-Tell myself (and this I've been doing, sort of) that it's a damn shame not to run when it's warm out. (Check!) Convince myself that anything above freezing counts as "warm." (Eh...) 

-Be a French aristocratic fashion model (who says things like, "See, I've had this great chance in life of being born with good genes. I was born tall, with a pretty face (not to everyone's taste, I concede), and a thin body."), move to Paris, and hire someone called Bruno to whip me into shape.

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