You look down at your phone and see it’s already seven at night and you still haven’t done your exercise for today. It’s been in the back of your mind, gnawing at your sense of accomplishment. You were too sore the day before so you decided to skip your workout and delay it until the morning. You even set your alarm to go-off one hour earlier than you normally would; get it out of the day before you’re even awake enough to feel the searing exhaustion.
When the alarm goes off, you barely roll over before hitting snooze. Five minutes later, instead of opening your eyes to greet the day, you turn your chirping alarm off and close your eyes into the cool damp pillow. You dream of sailing down a river on a Viking long ship with your fellow raiders & warriors. They sing songs in a guttural-sounding language but the melody is sublime to your drifting ears. Droplets of the unpredictable river underneath splash against your cheek but as you wipe them away, they morph into a cold sweat. You awake from your dreamscape to find that you slept in & have to rush out the door for work. You barely remember to brush your teeth, so you bring the brush along for the ride. On your drive to work, the burdening guilt of “forgetting” to exercise hits and the disappointment flashes red across your face. But you have a long lunch break & there’s a gym five minutes from your office.
Lunch comes & goes. You go to the burger joint with your favorite co-workers & joke about your bosses & make plans for the weekends. On the way to the office, sitting in the back seat as Gerald tells you about how he’s taking Cheryl kayaking on Saturday, you pass the Fitness Center. The leftover fries quickly taste like pure grease & you hide the stained, crinkled brown bag of shame between your legs. As soon as you get home after work, that’s when you’ll do your workout. Besides, you’re more of a night person anyways.
Now your phone is glaring the time of 7:15pm in that embarrassing-mocking way only inanimate objects are guilty of. Thinking about how you haven’t exercised today has only bought you 15 extra minutes. You remember how you just ate dinner about an hour ago & how you remember a gym teacher from elementary school telling you that you shouldn’t exercise until 2 hours after you eat. But that was more than 25 years ago & that same teacher was also your Social Studies teacher & he told you that Christopher Columbus discovered both America and that the Earth wasn’t flat; which is crazy to think about now after learning how the Vikings like Leif Ericson sailed to Greenland and eastern Canada hundreds of years before Columbus was even born. And when the Vikings stepped off those infamous long ships, standing not too far away from them were people, people who were living here for hundreds of years before any of them were born.
You’ve had enough of this dance down memory lane. Now it’s becoming more stressful not doing it. You remember that this isn’t gym class. You aren’t working out for a grade or for someone else’s benefit. This is for you. The only person it hurts to not do it is you. So, reluctantly, you put on your sweat pants & that old Minnesota Vikings t-shirt. Turn on some Led Zeppelin & let’s start rowing!