A Couch Potato on the Run

My letter to the gentlemen in surgical masks at DFW:

I realize that this is a serious disease. Yes, people have died from it, and that's awful no matter what the cause is. Yes, it's spreading around the world faster than wildfire. But come on people!!! To walk around the Dallas Ft. Worth airport wearing surgical masks while eating (with your bare hands) Big Macs from McDonald's is a tad ridiculous.

For one thing, as paunchy as you guys are, you probably have a far higher risk of dying from heart disease after a life of eating Big Macs than you do of contracting the swine flu.

For another thing, why protect your mouth and not your hands? You touch a lot more nasty stuff with your hands than your mouth.

(Errr. Actually I don't know that for sure and don't want to know that for sure. But it's just a guess, because these gents didn't exactly appear to be too popular with the ladies. Even the pay-by-the-hour type of ladies.)

Why not wear gloves if you're that hyper about contracting swine flu?

And another thing...you talk about "our friends from the South" bringing this disease into this country.

(And make no mistake, the word "friends" didn't come out in a too friendly tone.)

Well, I hate to break it to you, but look who's predominantly working at that McDonald's that you just went to? Look who put their hands all over your meat and cheese and drink? Look who got all their "Mexican-American germs" all over your food? Huh? How do you feel now, bitchez?!?!?!

(OK strike the last few sentences. I got a little riled up. But honestly, I can't stand these snide, middle-aged white men acting like everyone from Mexico or of Mexican descent, whether they've ever stepped foot in Mexico or NOT, is carrying the swine flu. It's racist, it's degrading, it's disgusting.)

End of my tirade. I just think it's heartbreaking that people who already suffer from so much discrimination here in Texas now are bearing the brunt of "their people" (argh!) bringing a deadly disease into this country. I'm hearing people saying, "SEE???? That's why we should have shut the border between Texas and Mexico long ago!!! We should have slammed that border shut long ago! Then they wouldn't be bringing this awful swine flu in here!!!"

Seriously? Do people not realize that there are planes that fly all around the world? Shut the border all you want, but it's not going to do any good. We're a highly globalized society. We're going to spread a disease no matter what. Shutting the border between Texas and Mexico isn't going to do much at all in the grand scheme of things.

Furthermore, the most recent reports are indicating the first cases of swine flu might have come from California itself. Not Mexico. I would love to see these guys' faces when they hear THAT.

So I have to get this off my chest.

In one week I am going to Paris. (Paris, France...not Paris, Texas, you yokels).

This is great because I love Paris. It's my favorite city on earth except for Seattle and Rio. (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil...not Del Rio, Texas, you yokels.)

HOWEVER...

The Paris trip is also bad news because I'm a fatass.

It's true. All the running/biking/staring at my scale/hiking/walking hasn't lost me any calories and henceforth, it hasn't lost me any poundage. I'm WAY heavier than I would like to be, even though I feel like I'm in better shape than I have been in the past. I could lie and say that all the weight is from my incredible newfound muscles, but the sad truth is I haven't really gained much muscle mass. Plus, my pants are tight, and I don't think I can attribute THAT to a six-pack.

The last time I was in Paris I weighed about 20, 25 lbs less (see my "trying really hard to mock the French" pic below). And no, my eye doesn't really look like that. I was trying to wink for the camera. (French people wink and stuff.)




So...this is going to be a little hard for me. Paris is the city of fashion, the city of skinny snobby French people, and I worry that I'm going to stick out as a fat American everywhere I go. More importantly, I get to see Bas for the first time in months...and I'm at my least attractive.

To try to combat this, the past two weeks I've slashed my daily calorie intake to under 1200, and I've tried to walk 5 miles and run 2 miles at least every other day, as my tendon will cooperate. I thought this was going pretty well until I discovered I had only lost one pound.

So I am resigned to a fat fate. A faux-French fat fate. Which is why I stuffed myself on Chinese food tonight because I was at a giving-up point. I'm so frustrated that even though I'm working out and eating less, I'm not losing all the stress fat that's been piling up over the past year.

WHEN WILL I FINALLY BE A LEAN MEAN RUNNING MACHINE???

(You don't have to answer that. It was a rhetorical question. But if you have an answer, then I'd love to hear it. I will even give you one of my egg rolls if you have that answer.)

Walked: 5 miles
Ran: 2 miles
Biked: 20 minutes

OK. I had a very mean-spirited, uber-bitch moment last night when I was running.

I know it's summer already in Dallas, because for the first time in a few months I've actually seen life on the track (besides ducks). Real human life.

All winter I've had the track to myself because most Dallasites are wusses when it comes to cold weather and exercising late at night. But last night it had warmed up, the cicadas were in full drone, the sky was clear, the evening was pleasant, and two other women were on the track with me.

So I was walking my 5 miles and keeping an eyeball on them the whole time. For one thing, they looked like they were my age. For another thing, they looked pretty skinny. (Skinnier than me.) So I was curious how much they would end up exercising.

It turns out they walked half a mile and then one of the girls ran a quarter of a mile. And as I watched them leave the track I thought, "Ha! How pathetic! I can run their asses into the ground."

And then I immediately felt ashamed. What a bitch I am! There was a time in my life when I could only run a quarter of a mile too. And there are sure as hell a LOT of people who can run MY ass into the ground. Why was I being so mean?

My best guess is that they were skinnier than me, and that's what set off my bitch-alarm. I tell myself that I would rather be larger and athletic than skinny and out of shape, but maybe my mind disagrees.

Does anyone else do that? Size people up when they're running (for leisure, not in a race) and go, "I wonder how much they're capable of?" Or I am just a nosy, competitive, mean-spirited-for-no-reason kind of person?

Yikes.

So lately Dallas has been having torrential rain. This isn't unusual -- we often get pouring rain in the spring thunderstorms that love this part of the country. But to have 3+ days of non-stop torrential rain is weird.

So when I got to the track last night, the rain had stopped but the track was soaked. It was a mucky, disgusting MESS. Reddish mud and nastiness was everywhere.

At first, I was slogging through a couple of miles at a walk, and all of a sudden I noticed that I had company on this miserable track.

There was a large puddle in the football field in the middle of the track. The puddle was maybe ten feet long and two feet wide and surely couldn't have been that deep. But despite the tiny size of the puddle, three fat ducks were swimming peacefully, without a care in the world.

OK, so I'm not used to ducks swimming on a football field, and I'm especially not used to running past ducks swimming on a football field. I felt bad for them because any time I walked or ran past them, they freaked out, swam out of the puddle, and hauled ass across the forty-yard line, trying to put some distance between us. Then when I had passed, they waddled back to the puddle and hopped right back in. This went on over and over, because I did around 12 laps of either walking or running. The damn ducks never figured out that I had zero interest in them. Like clockwork, they waddled away, stopped, turned, and waddled back. Ducks are strange.

Or maybe they were practicing a few plays on the football field? Taking care of some early spring training?

The nasty track conditions were also interesting because they left footprints. I saw people footprints, dog footprints, and of course those adorable V-shaped duck footprints. (But only across one section of the track, where the ducks crossed to get to the puddle. My duck friends apparently weren't interested in circling the track to lose a few inches in the waistline, like me. I guess ducks don't have to deal with the joy and then horror of eating THREE BOXES OF GIRL SCOUT COOKIES. Damn those Thin Mints.)

Duck Wanna-be Football Players + Running = An Interesting Evening at the Track.

Dallas has had a lot of interesting sunsets lately. I don't know if it's because of all the cold fonts and warm fronts mixing together (we've gone from 40 degrees to 80+ degrees several times in the past few months), or if we've just had some pretty cloud formations.

Either way, when I've been able to see them, I've been rushing to get my camera. So I thought I'd post a few of them for you to enjoy. Sorry that a few of them are a little blurry...my camera has been uncooperative lately.

I do apologize for my recent silence -- I'm just kind of in a gloomy stage and trying to figure out what I want out of life. Our whole team nearly lost our jobs last month, and though we're hanging on now, our contract is up for negotiations in May, which means we could be out the door then. I have a huge amount of student debt which, while I'm still in school, has a pretty reasonable interest rate, but I'm really really really terrified of unemployment right now. I feel like a lot of my life right now is playing "the waiting game" -- just waiting for something to happen. It's a weird feeling and I definitely don't like it.

In the meantime, I'm thinking about registering for a 5K in May. I haven't been running more than a mile and a half lately, but I think with 2 months' preparation I'll know whether or not my tendon can handle a 5K.

Anyway, enjoy the pics!

I'm taking a little hiatus from the blog for awhile. I've had some very devastating things happen in my life the past couple of weeks (both professionally and personally) and it's been hard for me to even think about being witty and fun in a blog post. I'll still run, of course...it's the only thing keeping me sane...but I won't write anything because I'm not in the mood to be chipper and funny. And NO ONE wants to read the blog of a gloomy gus, anyway. And yes, I said "gloomy gus." :)

Take care all.