Seven Minutes

Dearest Rachel –

If you choose your activity carefully, and put your mind to it, you can accomplish a lot in seven minutes.

I can get my point across in that amount of time, for instance. Oh, I don’t mean that I can write these letters anywhere near that quickly; I consider myself fortunate if I can get something down in text over the course of an hour or so. But I do try to ensure that it’s concise enough that it shouldn’t take more than that amount of time for you to absorb what I have to say. Even (especially?) when we were in each other’s presence twenty-four hours a day, it’s not as if we did (or could) spent that entire time communicating with each other; best to keep things to small, bite-sized snippets of thought. As humans, we may consider ourselves fairly complex, but it shouldn’t take all that long to get to know each other, and what we’re thinking.

For that matter, it supposedly doesn’t take all that long to get to know each other in other senses, as well. I’m reminded of that notorious (but likely mythical – I mean, I’ve never known anybody who’d even played the game in junior high or high school, and I’d wager you never did, either) party game, “Seven Minutes in Heaven.” Basically an advanced version of “Spin the Bottle,” two ‘random’ kids of the opposite gender (which, now that I think of it, probably makes this game leagues more difficult to organize in this day and age, if it was ever played in the first place) would be selected to be locked in a closet or other confined space to, ah, get to know each other. You can probably figure out where this was expected to lead, although again, I have my doubts if it ever did or could. Mechanically, I’d postulate that it would be more than possible, although whether both partners would be sufficiently gratified by it – and they could make themselves presentable before the door was re-opened on them – is probably something of a stretch.

And on the subject of stretching, it seems that I am able to cover the equivalent of a mile by boat in that same seven minutes.

***

As trivial as that last one sounds, I’m thinking that this is the sort of thing that you and I would talk about on a regular basis. Of all the answers to “So, how was your day, honey?” I could have come up with yesterday, this was the thing that rather stood out as unusual. Sure, I got a lot of the tasks I had set in my mind to accomplish at the ‘office,’ but that was stuff that even I would consider fairly routine and dull. I may get the dopamine hit for taking care of it all, but there’s nothing particularly noteworthy about it, and it’s not really a subject that would pique your interest. It’s just a ordinary routine collection of tasks I do every month, and aside from those who go over these things, it’s not something I’d expect one to find particularly fascinating.

But this, while a relatively small thing, is something I’ve never been able to do before. I can’t expect to see myself in an Olympic skulls team for it, but this is a breakthrough in terms of a personal best. I’ve been able to cover the 1,600 meters at a rate of a hundred every thirty seconds or less since day one at the gym, and even shave a full thirty seconds off of that average by the time I had finished this portion of my workout, but I’d never come close to completing the distance a full minute ahead of that rate. If I wasn’t so worn out by the exertion, I’d have been exultant when I reached that distance, only to see ‘6:5X:XX’ in the field where the time was indicated.

Not that I hadn’t been paying attention to the time the whole while that I was rowing. I’ll admit it; when it comes to things I don’t really want to do, I’m a clock watcher. Whatever it may be, I want to get the whole ordeal over with as quickly as possible, so I can get home and go back to things I’d rather be doing. And while being at the gym requires a certain amount of time spent – so it’s not going to ever be over with faster – I still keep my eye on the clock. When I’m cycling, it’s all about how face the pace bike is going, and how far ahead of him I can get – I usually want to be a minute ahead of him for every mile of the course by the time I finish. On the treadmill, I turn up the speed every minute (and, after the first five, I start to lower the incline from 15° to flat). So, while I may not pay attention to what time it is, I’m still watching the clock the whole time I’m there.

***

While I will continue to acknowledge how I don’t want to be there, and don’t want to do what I’m doing, it is gratifying to see these moments when I reach a certain personal best. Even better, when I get home and step on the scale, and see myself below 249 for the first time in over a year (actually, the first time, the scale read ‘237.5,’ but that seemed so far out of line as to be ridiculous; it took four tries before I had two readings that agreed), I know that I’m actually making progress.

I wish you could be here to celebrate, and cheer me on. Why, you might have even invited me into a nearby closet for seven minutes as a reward…

But no matter. I’ve got to keep this up; after all, I may have passed a couple of psychological milestones, but I’ve still got a long way to go – some thirty-odd pounds, in fact, if Lars is to be believed. So barring any earthly reward (apart from having less of myself to carry around), keep an eye on me, and wish me luck. I’m going to need it.