New Toy

Thanks for sharing. It brought tears to my eyes just knowing you had
found true bliss. Or is that blisters, I forget.......

Les Stewart said:

Running presents a problem for me aside from having to get off the couch and
release the remote control… NO TOYS! What kind of sport is it that has no
use for titanium or graphite? I mean, what do you need for running? Shoes
and shorts are about it, and you can do without those if you wish to emulate
the spirit of the original Olympic Games where the participants were nude.
This may have been fine in ancient Greece but the locals in my hometown have
no appreciation of the ancient ways... between the guffaws and the community
service, I won't make THAT mistake again!

However by careful study of any number of professional running magazines,
you can of course, find all sorts of things to buy that you never knew
existed, much less thought you needed. My new toy is a heart rate monitor
which according to an ad in Professional Runners Magazine is used by all
professional runners.

Of course I am a professional runner now that I have paid a huge sum of
money to get up at 5AM in freezing weather to run some unimaginable distance
for no apparent reason while drinking warm Gatorade (how they get warm
Gatorade in freezing weather needs to be investigated) and using a
porta-potty which have already been visited by the 14,000 people who are
deathly afraid of dehydration and have been carbo-loading on mass quantities
of strange, apparently indigestible foods for the last week … but I digress.

Tossing the instructions (which are only used by girlie-men) I went out for
a run only to shortly return and retrieve the gravy covered booklet from the
trash.

The instructions said to put the monitor strap around your chest right below
your chest muscles... hmmmm … poking around MY chest area I only found a
strange growth that probably needs to be looked at and some man breasts… but
nothing that seemed to bulge in a muscular nature. Rereading the
instructions, I noted that the device was made in Singapore. AHA! Must be a
translation problem because, resuming my search, I did EASILY find my
abdominal muscle… it stood out clear and firm. That's it, they must have
meant ABOVE the abdominal muscle… ha ha… those silly Singaporean translators
have much to learn.

Back on the road, I was cruising, in tune with my body, at one with the
road, RUNNINGLIKETHEWIND, exercising at precisely the proper percentage of
my MHR (maximum heart rate) when while diligently watching the "large
screen, easily readable, digital readout” on my wrist, when I ran into a
fire hydrant. I'm not sure what that did to my heart rate as it was tough to
read the "large screen, easily readable, digital readout” through the
tears...