Friday, February 26, 2010

I Will Never do That Again............


Okay, it has nothing to do with the post but I thought it was funny.

Walking over to the community center to exercise with the 'Blue hairs', the wind was gusting and sending chills through my blue jeans (thus the cartoon). The snow was drifting across the roads and I was just not into running out in these elements.

Then I remembered that they had these machines that you could use to simulate running but you stay in the same place! Ha that's what I'll do, I'll use the 'Running in place simulator machine'.

Of course since I packed my bag for running outside, I only had a long-sleeved T-shirts and thank God I still had shorts in my bag. Along with seven pairs of extra socks!

So I mounted this strange machine and started pushing buttons. How can a machine with 1,212 buttons not have an owner's manual attached to it? I was fortunate enough to get a signal on my Garmin and I finally managed to get the moving path on the machine going.

The first few minutes were slow but I eventually got the machine to a point where I was running. I was amazed at the older woman next to me that was walking on her machine but I couldn't get ahead of her. I'm assuming that she would throw in a few surges to catch me when I was looking at her.

This was amazing, I was able to run and build up a sweat on this machine and stay out of the cold wind and snow. Of course this was all too good to be true, I glanced down at my Garmin and it read 0.00. How could this be, I was sweating and breathing hard(even though I still couldn't get away from the woman walking)? The clock on the Garmin was functioning and my legs were still moving but it wasn't registering any distance!

Frustration set in and I decided something must be wrong with the Garmin and startegized how to leave the moving path without hurting myself or the fast walking woman next to me. Luckily, I spotted an emergency stop button and pressed it, since this was an emergency. I expected some alarms and sirens to go off and the staff to rush to my aid but the only thing that happened was the path stopped moving.

.....and that was how I spend two minutes and fourteen seconds on the 'Running in place machine'.......

6 comments:

Lily on the Road said...

OMG, I'm crying!! You ALWAYS make me laugh,

Have a GREAT weekend!!!

Anne said...

Too funny! A great description of that dreaded treadmill's pluses and minuses. And trying to compete with the senior citizen - that takes balls, Ken. (Sorry, I just had to work that in under the circumstances.)

Anonymous said...

What a great resource!

o2bhiking said...

Ah, life on the treadmill! Not my favorite thing. Although I do like the eliptical machine, but never go anywhere on that either.

Regarding the cold weather, yeah, I've had to check a time or two myself. So far, so good.

Marlene said...

Ahahahaha, excellent ode to the "Running in Place Machine"!

CoachLiz said...

7 pairs of socks! Dang, you are prepared!

 
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