The Fat Man Misses A Golden Opportunity

This post was written without the aid of corrective visual lenses. This si why there are so many mistakes.

It’s 2am and I’m still awake. I’ve been up since 5:30 this morning, and I feel as though I have done nothing. Sure, I went to work. I even did work at work today for a change. Sure, I went to the gym after work and ran on the treadmill for 45 minutes. Or, rather, I walked/ran for 45 minutes. My Demon Knee ™ started burning after a while and I had to slow down.

Ten minutes into the jog/walk fun, a couple of ladies in tight spandex jumped onto the treadmills next to me and proceeded to being their workout. They were young and in relatively good shape, and they joked with each other as they ran. After a while, however, they grew silent. The sudden change in ambient noise drew my attention and I looked over. They had matched my speed and every few seconds, they glanced quickly in my direction to see what I was doing. I laughed to myself and sped up a bit.

For those of you who don’t know, I used to have crazy high blood pressure. Back when I was pushing 400 pounds, my resting blood pressure was around 180/120, and I still find it amazing that I haven’t had a heart attack or a stroke. In fact, I had to take the maximum blood pressure pills allowable by law for several years in order to keep such a thing from happening. When I started losing weight, my blood pressure dropped substantially. They continually cut back the medication to the point that I had to stop taking it. This played havoc with my system for a while. I actually passed out from low blood pressure one day and later, when I woke up (luckily), my dad drove me to the doctor, where I found that my bp was 90/45.

There is no such thing as a happy medium with me.

The lasting result of all this is that getting my heart rate up to the point where I can get a good cardiovascular workout is a monumental task. It also means that I get drunk very easily, which is why I usually have either 1 to 2 drinks in a sitting or far, far too many. My limit is low and once I pass it, I ain’t stoppin’.

Here’s an example of what it takes to get my heart going. Shortly after they took me off the bp medication, I had yet another bout of crippling dizziness. My doctor wanted to be sure it wasn’t heart related, so he sent me to the hospital for a battery of tests. One came back stating that I’d had a “silent heart attack” some time in the past six months. This didn’t make sense to me because the day before the dizziness started I had hiked 12 miles over rough terrain in the hot summer sun. Heart attack victims don’t tend to do such things. They sent me to a cardiovascular specialist for an extensive stress test (it took four hours) to see what was going on. Part of the test included having to walk on a treadmill in order to get my heart up to the point where it was “stressed” enough to run the test. I was on the treadmill for fifteen minutes, running at a sprint on the full incline and my heart rate only got up to 140 bpm. They ran the test and, of course, it came back negative for a heart attack.

It turns out that the dizziness was the beginnings of the Exploding Eyeball Syndrome and resulted from an incorrect prescription for my contacts.

So today, at the gym, when the two young ladies increased their speed or angle of inclination on the treadmill, I inched a little further ahead. They were young, hot, and in shape and they couldn’t keep up with the fat, bald slob next to them. I would laugh at the situation if it weren’t for the fact that such a physical anomaly is likely to come back and bite me in the ass later in life.

Plus, I did not parlay the situation into an opportunity to get to know either of said hot women better in an attempt to possibly ask one of them out. I am too chicken for that. Also, I later went to the weight benches and embarrassed myself in front of a 13 year old who was lifting at least 30 more pounds than me.

But so what, eh? It’s been a long time and you have to start somewhere, right?