Dearest Rachel –
I’ll admit, I had planned to skip my usual weekday workout this morning anyway. Sure, I hadn’t hit the gym all weekend, due to working in the booth – which required a lot more active attention to details than some times, due to the unpredictable nature of baptism weekend – nor did I manage to fast for any twenty-four hour period throughout that time. And sure, the weekend was bookended by a couple of relatively heavy meals – one on Friday afternoon with just Daniel, and another yesterday afternoon with the family for an early Mother’s Day (as we won’t be in town for the actual holiday).
Despite these setbacks (although can you really call them that when you enjoy them? Maybe not the results they produce, but a good meal is just that… good), I did wake up this morning under the two-fifteen line. And while that’s not exactly something worth bragging about compared to where I was most of last week, that’s an improvement over, say, Saturday morning’s weigh-in. So an extension of the ongoing respite given by the weekend, while not meant as a reward by any means, seemed at least justifiable.
Granted, the main reason to skip the gym today has to do with yet another meal, as opposed to any need or desire to reward myself. Pastor Scott had asked to meet with Daniel and me today, and this was the day that seemed to work with both of our schedules. I will admit, the invitation got me wondering why, and despite his assurances that there was no particular reason prompting him to do so, my paranoid mind put together a list of possibilities that could have been a whole other letter to you. However, seeing as it would be out of date in but a few hours, and some of my conclusions were pretty far-fetched – honestly, looking it over, I would swear that I’d written it after just having woken up, and given that I’ve sent you a few such letters, you know they can get pretty ‘out there’ some times – I don’t think that I should bother sending it to you; I’ll let you figure out what kind of reasons I might have come up with on your own.
Maybe you’re wondering what a lunch meeting has to do with whether I go to the gym in the morning or not. Those two activities are reasonably separate on my daily calendar, right? Well, not exactly. First of all, my workout isn’t just the hour-plus I spend on the treadmill, as you know by now. I also get reps on both the ab machine and the pec fly, and while neither of those take terribly long, they aren’t instantaneous, either. And, of course, there’s the walk to and from the place (assuming it’s not raining – which it isn’t, although there’s indications that it might, both today and tomorrow, so… yeah. Lars and I aren’t walking until Wednesday because of that); it’s short enough to not be too draining either way, but again, those take time, too. Add to that the time taken to wash, dry, get dressed and have breakfast (although, given that we’d be having lunch, I could – and probably should – skip that this morning), and there would be almost no time to get over to the folks’ place to do some ‘work’ on this or that thing at the ‘office’ before I’d have to return to collect Daniel and head out. So you can see why this interferes with that routine – which I’m fine with, by the way.
Because there’s yet another reason not to hit the gym this morning, which is a little less explicable. I don’t know if I was in the middle of a dream that had me walking about – I think I can recall wandering about an amusement park (possibly Cedar Point, which it turns out we won’t be visiting next week after all, per consensus), although I don’t think that had anything to do with it. At some point, I stretched my right leg, only for a searing cramp to shoot through it, waking me up and causing me to frantically start rubbing the back of my calf muscle in order to get the pain to dissipate. It took longer than I’d like, I’ll tell you that, and once the pain subsided, I was still pretty wobbly on my feet as I took the moment to visit the washroom before returning to bed, as it was still pretty dark. Moreover, I’d been up relatively late last night with Daniel – you might have been proud of me for it, in fact. It wasn’t quite until midnight – I still have my limits, honey – but it was surprisingly close, and we were even watching a playthrough of a horror game, albeit by our favorite comic gamer that you never got a chance to see in action. After which, we had to have a mental palate cleanser, so we flipped through a few short reels of a fellow who documents his visits to various fast food restaurants through Japan – we’re going to want to do some of these places at some point in the relatively near future – before calling it a night.
So when I got jarred awake by this charley horse (at least, that’s what I think it was), I’d barely gotten five hours of sleep. Needless to say, while the gym was already open by then – and if I’d gone at that moment, all else being equal, I could have gotten in the workout I might have been able to use and had plenty of time for everything my schedule had planned – I was in no condition to do so, between both the cramping and the lack of sleep. It just didn’t seem like a good idea – and certainly, an hour or two more of sleep felt so much better. So, that’s what I did.
Even now, it’s still making itself felt; I do hope it’s gone by the end of the day, when we need to be wrapping things up at Awana tonight (to say nothing of tomorrow morning, when I really ought to resume my workout schedule, however abbreviated). To that end, honey, keep an eye on me, and wish me luck. I’m going to need it.
Letters to Rachel 