Full of Grace

I am not what you would call an athlete. In grade school, the only time I scored during five years of playing basketball was in the other team's basket. I've struck out at T-ball.

Actually, rather than write five thousand words about what a klutz I can be, I'll submit this video, taken last year during a cruise, as Exhibit A.



Yes, those are my two sisters making fun of me in the background and getting admonished by a stranger. Yes, they deserved it.

Anyway, I was very nervous about starting to work out, something I had never really done before. And you know what? I was right to be nervous because my first day working out with a trainer, I came really close to fainting and had to sit down on the sweaty gym mat with my head between my knees.

A few weeks later, I fell off the treadmill in a room full of people. I hopped back on, trying to play it off like I was so cool and athletic that I didn't even notice, but man oh man was it hard to go back to that gym the next day.

I also dropped my iPod into the bowels of the treadmill. It took the maintenance staff two weeks to take the treadmill apart and carefully extract it. As you can imagine, they just LOVE me at that gym.

So I'm not exactly gymnast material, but somehow I try to soldier on. My gym has a climbing wall outside for when the weather is not awful, which is for approximately eleven seconds in Chicago, and every once in a while I eye it and think, "Someday I'm going to get to the top of that thing." And I probably will someday, although I'll have paramedics standing by at the bottom, just in case.