NO RUN AROUND

Alright, I’m done making excuses. I have got to get off my slowing supine saggy-ish butt and kick it back into high gear. The time to start is now. Be all you can be… Just do it. Here I go…  any second now… as soon as I finish checking my e-mail I’ll jump to it…Ill be out the door in a moment I was just gonna peek at the ball scores and ooooo a new Facebook post… with a link to an extraordinarily slow-loading ad-laden multi-page quiz about which ‘sit-com non-lead character’ I am. That can’t take too much time to do. I just hope I’m not Ralph Furley or Newman…  crap I’m Uncle Arthur… but wait, on the same page next to the link here on the bottom with that splotchy stuff next to an eyeball there is that viral video of baby kittens held my a 7-year old girl, with a voice like Janis Joplin, wowing Simon Cowell on Bulgaria’s Got Talent… how long could it take to watch that?

And so goes all the time I could have been exercising.

I used to jog several miles most every morning. Now I have heard people say they truly enjoy getting up at for a 5:00 AM run. But I guess there are also people that enjoy eating Mongolian Boodog or paying to be shackled to a dungeon wall and beaten. I don’t judge; maybe I mock a little bit. But yes, there were some mornings my run was very enjoyable and I truly enjoyed being out there but I do not think it was ever on the top of my ‘best 100 things I could be doing at 5:00 AM list.  As a matter of fact it usually landed somewhere in the late-twenties on that list between extended REM sleep and calculating the earliest socially acceptable time for a mimosa.

I halted my daily morning jog routine when I went on a crazy strict diet a couple of years ago. At less than 1100 carb-less calories a day I did not have the energy. Hell, I barely had enough energy to lift a fork but that just helped the diet. After that massive weight loss I got tired of the constant Aids and Auschwitz comparisons that people made about my suddenly sickly slim looks and I started eating normally again. Without my normal running routine in place, my old friends pizza, bacon and beer quickly left their flabby residue poundage back on my ever expanding gut.

I needed to start running again. And I did …kinda… a little… until along came the scares of West Nile and his new buddy Zika. After the first half dozen local cases the City recommended staying inside at peak insect times or possibly wearing a head to toe body suit saturated with Deep Woods OFF. I already had bad allergies to insect bites and with swampy undeveloped Army Corp land, a bog filled golf course and a half built subdivision on my running path, my little happy AM jog became a dangerous dawn biting bug brouhaha. I moved my work out indoors and shifted to old school sit-ups, push-ups and jumping jacks. But then I hurt my hip and thigh.

When you’re in your teens or twenties and you hear older folks complain about their various aches and pains it does not sink in. Living with constant pain is as understandable to a kid as the tax complications of borrowing from your 401K. At that age you hurt yourself then heal in no time. Sprain a muscle and your better in the morning. Bust a leg and you are up dancing again in a just a few weeks. My Dad never dealt with constant aches and pain till his mid-eighties, my late brother much, much earlier. Apparently I am in between and my new ache de jour seems to want to linger (Gen Xers, feel free to hum the Cranberries song like I am… “did ya hafto, did ya hafto”).

Earlier this year I was lugging stuff down a staircase and I tweaked something in my lower hip. The internet called my nagging ache Trochanteric Pain Syndrome which is big fancy way of saying my outer thigh hurts and it will for a few months. I should have gone to my doctor  but she would have wanted to shove me in an MRI tube and send me to a bunch of frustrating specialists who would have pill-ed me up and recommend an array of different therapy treatments to  keep me busy until the pain disappears on its own and everyone celebrates their victory of separating me from stacks of money.  I know. I went through that same useless crap with a mystery ache under my ribs a few years ago. Yes it hurts. Yes it is getting better. Yes, it sucks to be getting older.

Years of soccer playing and off road bicycling caught up to a buddy of mine. In the months before he finally got hip replacement surgery, the only thing that relieved his constant pain was turmeric. Yeah the same seasoning I tossed into my beloved green curry shrimp and, my wife’s favorite Peruvian Massaman chicken dish. With the vigor of a fanatical Southern Baptist preacher outside an abortion clinic owned by a Jewish, anti-gun, gay couple, my friend went on and on singing his glowing medicinal praises of  turmeric on the internet. I hadn’t before heard of turmeric’s mythical healing powers like acai berries, St. John’s wort and kava kava before it.  Maybe I was catching this fad at the beginning; years ago I briefly fell under the spell of skullcap supplements but that might have been to score bonus points since it was recommended by the woman I was dating at the time who had managed a GNC.

Like the parade of trendy diets, there always seems to be a miracle something or another out there that everyone latches onto before they move onto the next ‘it’ thing. But this damn hip/thigh ache was not going away and there was no way I could jog with these shooting pains I was waking up with. I needed a miracle and, well my buddy with the hip thing was a Doctor… not a medical doctor but he has a doctorate. Years ago he was correct about the prescription Rogaine we tried together when it first came out. Both of us grew some minimal peach fuzz before I felt too self-indulgent rubbing that crap on my head and shifted to just using a daily razor.

So I did it. I wandered down that one overly hippie aisle at Whole Foods past the body oils, herbal extracts, crystal deodorant replacements, Acupuncture For Dummies manual and old school incense who’s smell mentally transported me back to the 1970’s Nation Of Islam guys selling incense and radicalized politics from folding tables off Times Square.

When the long haired sandal wearing ‘dude’ finished hitting on the braless dreadlocked chick, I asked him to help me pick out the most turmericy supplement in the store which also happened to be the most expensive bottle in the store. I took my turmeric night and day for 10 days and my ache started to feel better. This was it; life was great. I was going to become an internet preachy boy too.  I was pain-free… for two days… till the ache started again. No miracle No morning jog. Just a daily reminder I’m not a kid anymore. Humph

THE ONLY RACE I WAS EVER IN. BETHEL FIRECRACKER 500, BETHEL CT EARLY 80S