Reasons to believe it may be time to hit the gym again

    5. I toss and turn at night, uncomfortable and restless.

    4. When getting out of bed each morning, I grip the wall nervously, not quite sure if the joints and muscles in my legs will be able to hold me up.

    3. After sitting for an extended period of time to read or write, my back and leg muscles are stiff, and I can’t walk again until I do a little stretch and shift dance.

    2. The needle on the scale appears to be stuck.

    1. When bending over to pull up my pants, something in my back cracks, and I fall to the floor in writhing pain.

I am writing to you from my bed where I am lying flat on my back. And even this hurts, so I will make it snappy:

I think my tail bone fell off.

One minute I am the vision of beautifully dysfunctional health, and the next, I am looking my own mortality straight in the eye. I will be 36 years old next month – not exactly the age in which I thought my body would decide to go on strike. My 72 year old mother just recently starting complaining about arthritis pain, for crying out loud.

Ironically, just yesterday a friend and I were talking about how many more excuses we could possibly come up with before we just got off our asses and exercised. At this point it’s not even about losing weight for me – though that would be an excellent by product. No, I think the important thing for me right now is to be able to walk, and play with my kids, and pull up my pants without my tail bone falling off.

If my chiropractor can fix this, I will see you at the gym on Monday. Or maybe Tuesday… let’s give the back a day to rest, shall we?

3 thoughts on “Reasons to believe it may be time to hit the gym again”

  1. I turn 38 this year and have been mortified by my sudden slide into decrepitude; like you, I never expected things to start giving out this soon, and have since started hitting the home gym in an effort to stave off what is sure to be a massive — and possibly fatal — infarction in the heart region. At 6’2″ I’ve always carried my extra weight well, but lately have felt like I’m hauling bricks up the stairs to bed each night (they aren’t bricks, that’s my ass, apparently); I’d always had perfect 20/20 vision until a few years ago, when I discovered that in order to read a book I had to hold it exactly as far away from my face as my computer monitor sits from my eyes. And the combination of The World’s Worst Mattress and my steadily weakening back have turned wake-up time into a 20 minute silent-movie comedy in which various grunting acrobatics are required to hammer the Capital U of my backbone into its more appropriate Little L shape.

    Getting old sucks the big one.

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