Yesterday I went to the club this morning and put in 45 minutes on the treadmill, at a pretty good pace for me. Between 3 and 4 miles per hour most of the way. That’s a huge improvement over where I was two years ago, or even three months ago. But the workout left me questioning my sanity a bit. I was working out to Rock’n’Roll on the iPod and when Los Lobos live version of Marie Marie came on I pumped the speed up to 4 mph, which is a pretty good walking clip. When it was over a slow Bonnie Raitt song came on and I slowed down to it’s tempo. I was getting into Bonnie’s slide work and kind of closed my eyes. When I opened the up again, the treadmill’s control panel was running away from me. I had obviously slowed down too much and didn’t realize it. I was about to go off the back end, not able to reach the shutoff and too little time to catch up, and a concrete wall right behind me. I surprised myself by thinking fast enough to kick my legs out from under me, get my feet on the floor behind me and stop my fall with hands on either side of the moving pathway, on the edges of the treadmill. Thank God I’ve been working out, I never thought I’d attain that level of agility again after the year of the knee.
So I get plus marks for the physical realm for the 45 minutes of walking that endless highway and having the agility to to fall down without injury. I’ll even give myself a point in the mental column for realizing, in that split second before I went flying into the concrete block wall behind me, what I had to do in order to make a safe landing. But I’m a little concerned with the mental process that put me in that situation in the first place.
