On the Up Side

This is a follow up to my October 15th post on my daughter and my attempts at becoming Poekelan-practicing tough guys in our spare time. That blog entry left the future open--would I go back and try again after being severely traumatized on my second lesson, or not? Would our daughter go on, despite things not being quite what we had expected? Could we overcome these obstacles and make an ABC Family Movie out of the experience after all?

Umm, no. It took letters from physicians to extract us from our contracts after a couple more months of wrestling with a sense of failure, then more months to recover from shaming by staff for not coming in to deal with my shit and guilt for the fair amount of expense involved in the damaging mess.

But on the Up Side: I discovered just how out of shape I was and started to do something about it. Originally, in September, so I wouldn't be embarrassed in class, I began hill-walking in the neighborhood for half an hour daily as soon as junior was in kindergarten. After giving up on grappling with teen aged martial arts instructors, I took it up a notch to speedy hill-walking, and even started rowing on the ergometer again this last couple of weeks, as there were signs that I might have developed some stamina and wouldn't embarrass myself by managing only fifteen minutes on the erg.

To my immense surprise, I managed forty minutes fairly well, and when I took the puppy out for a walk yesterday, we ended up running one and a half of the two miles (and Malti-chons can run remarkably fast for foofy dogs). I sure couldn't do that last August.

I'm not going to rave about the results of my brush with organized athletics, but disastrous as it was in other ways, that is why I'm exercising now. So something good came out of it after all.