Torture

Merry Christmas! Ben has posted a great response to the blog in his myspace blog -- which is the way I sometimes feel too, minus the prison guard training bit, of course. Which brings me to last night's run. The sweat was dripping down my arm, which I was soundly laughed at for likening to Chinese water torture:

Running

Current mood: exhausted

I just finished reading my step-daughter's running blog and am completely exhausted and need a good nights sleep to recover. Most of my experience with running centered around getting away. It's just not good for me to run. All these people I see running and huffing and sweating and spitting and blowing their noses...they impress the hell out of me but not enough to get me out there for the cardio-pulminary thing. Way back in the early 80's I knew this guy, I'll call him Jim (because that was his name), who kept telling me how easy it was to build up the long-distance huff-puff, breathe-that-exhaust-from-diesel-Mercedes Benz-mother-fuckers-cars-until-you-drop-dead-health bullshit. So I gave it a try. Jim and I would gear up and run around Tiburon for an hour or so and, in fact, I was able to do around six big ones after a surprisingly short time...maybe six weeks or so. I ended up attending the Richard A. McGhee Correctional Academy in Galt, California to become a big bad Prison Guard...excuse me...Correctional Officer. Part of my training was to get up at 4:30 A.M. and run 2.5 miles WITH a flashlight so a passing farmer wouldn't run over me in his John Deere. It was torture. It was far more profound than simple torture. Nothing about me, or my body, felt better after the run. I contracted a lung disease that I had to keep to myself or be thrown out of the Academy and forfit all that great brain-washing sleep-deprivation and how-to-apply-restraint-gear-to-a-violent-criminal stuff. By the end of the seven million year Academy commitment, I swore, and prayed, that I'd never...NEVER run again unless it was to get away from someone chasing me down the street with a knife...a knife with a blade measuring at least ten inches or more. Even then, I'd stop after a quarter mile or so and raise my hands to the sky in sweet surrender. I GOTTA get some rest now.