One of the things I know I have to do to be successful with losing weight this year is to put more time on the treadmill. But it’s so darn boring! Workout music helps, but if you are going to run for at least an hour like I want to start doing, then you need to kick things up a notch. To help me put in longer times on the treadmill I added a little table that I could put my laptop on so that I could use the laptop while on the treadmill. I’ve got some ideas to make it even better and once I get some pictures of it I’ll put up a post. I think it’s pretty cool so subscribe for free to my blog if you want to be notified as soon as I post it!
I want to tell you about the hour I put on the treadmill today, but first I thought I’d share a story about Bob, a guy I lived and worked with when I was 19. Bob was a little weird and some of it rubbed off on me. He got me into Kahlil Gibran, for goodness sakes. At one point he was reading a lot about extreme yoga that involved ritual washing of the intestines, although I don’t think he ever actually went through with it. He did spend a lot of time in the bathroom but I don’t think he was soaking…
Anyway, we worked in a restaurant doing a variety of jobs and one day we were both busboys with him doing the floor and me washing dishes. By then we were both good at our jobs and the work was easy and boring. So we would find different strange things to do to keep us interested and challenged. On this particular day I was keeping up easily on dishes and had a lot of empty stainless steel counter-top to work with. For no reason that I can recall I thoroughly soaked a paper towel and then spread it out to dry. Bob asked me what I thought would happen when it dried out and I said I thought it would result in a stiff piece of paper towel.
“Have you ever done it before?” he asked. After I said that I had not he remarked, “If you haven’t done it before, how do you know for sure what the result will be? What if nobody in the world had done some strange thing, could you know for sure that it wouldn’t spontaneously combust, for example?”
How do you answer that? Well I didn’t have a good answer so we spent the better part of the day doing all sorts of strange things we figured nobody had ever done before, just to see if something unexpected happened, similar to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory, which basically says that “nothing is real unless it is observed.” (Google is my friend!)
So what caused me to think about Bob today?
Because I did something I don’t think had every been done before on my treadmill, and a strange result did indeed ensue.
The good news is that I put in over an hour on the treadmill, walking at a leisurely 3.2 m.p.h pace, but sweating nonetheless. The bad news is that shortly after hitting the hour mark my treadmill, which had surely never been running for over an hour at a time, spontaneously combusted.
OK, maybe not. But it did power-down. And I can’t get it powered-up. Which is a bummer because I had big plans for putting more time in on this thing and I can’t afford a new treadmill right now.
That hour may have been my last for awhile.
P.S. - From what I can tell, there has never before been a blog post made referencing Kahlil Gibran, Quantum Physics, spontaneous combustion and exercising. I wonder what will happen when I click Publish?
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