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Sunshine and a Purple Dress

"One thing's for sure, we're all going to be a lot thinner." (Hans Solo) "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...." a chubby 13-year-old girl tried to jog around the track at Centennial Secondary School. She failed miserably.
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This is Jan Carrie Steven's illustration of her encounter with a treadmill. Supplied photo.
"One thing's for sure, we're all going to be a lot thinner." (Hans Solo)

"A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...." a chubby 13-year-old girl tried to jog around the track at Centennial Secondary School. She failed miserably. Too bad she has no long-term memory…

Sunday, Sept. 29, 2013

Today I said to my hubs, after I came home from church and after we had lunch (tomato soup with whole grain noodles and grilled vegan-cheese sandwiches and lightly fried baby kale,) “Where do you want to go for our one hour Sunday afternoon fast-walk today?”

He looked at me with the eyes of a person who has two jobs – a teacher with a stack of preparation and marking to do, and a publisher with a superstack of editing and marketing to avoid – and replied, “Nowhere. It’s raining outside.”

And it was. I confess that I think walking in the rain, like walking in sleet, is a miserable way to spend part of a restful Sunday afternoon. I decided to try something new. I would go fast-walking on a machine at Goodlife Fitness. This is not a Jan-like activity. Whereas group exercise involves meeting lots of people and doing moves I’d never even thought of, the treadmill – by contrast - is solitary and repetitive.

No matter, I got my transistor radio (yes a transistor radio, I am that much of a technophobe) and my headphones, and off I went.

I stared at the rows of machines facing forward – elliptical, treadmills, stairmasters, and cycles – and wondered how folks decide which one to do. And then, having done that, which of the 10 do you pick. I picked a treadmill smack-dab in the middle and starting sorting through the bells and whistles, knobs and bars.

Eventually I found the three important buttons – time, speed, and incline. But there was a red button on the left hand side with a clip.

“I have a bad feeling about this,” I said, and I asked the person running along beside me what it was for. She explained – without missing a breath or a stride - that you can clip the string attached to it to yourself so that if you trip, it applies an emergency break to the treadmill.

You think you know where this is going. You think I’m going to say, “Nah I didn’t need that.” And then managed to fall off the treadmill and make a right fool of myself. I did the latter, but for a different reason. I did hook myself up, but I wave my arms around when I walk and managed to cause an emergency stop three times before I decided that I could hurt myself doing this.

Eventually I got the speed up to four and the slope up to four and I decided to venture running. When I run, my arms flail all over the place, and I managed to wrap one arm around the earphone cord and fling my transistor into the next aisle. Dang! Now, how to stop this thing?! There is a pause button. Off I shuffled to pick up my relic which has separated into two pieces with the impact. But it still worked. Phew!

It took me a while to get up to the “four and four” level, and then I decided to break into a slow run again – and managed to knock my transistor radio out of the park again. Groan, pause, shuffle, and restart. I ended up doing this three times. Next time, I am bringing duct tape to affix my radio to the treadmill.

While I was attempting to master the treadmill, I was listening to “Spark” on CBC radio. Part of the show was about how people form loving attachments to the machinery around them. This isn’t a new phenomenon. My Dad used to call his car Bessie; my hubs has very colourful names for his computer; our youngest daughters went into hysterics when Laurence put their Furbies into the trunk of the car; and then there are the robots in Star Wars…

Hmm, what could I call my transistor radio? “R2D2 seems like an appropriate name. It’s silver, small, and user-friendly, and it’s outdated technology.

But what to call the treadmill? Definitely Darth Vader. It’s black, it makes gruff noises, makes brutal demands, and likes to throw people to their untimely end.

Jan Carrie Steven has decided to write a story a day (well, almost every day), and these stories are posted at sunshineandapurpledress.weebly.com.

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