Athlete's Feet

Two years ago, a good friend of mine invited me over for dinner to meet the woman he was going to marry.  She was incredibly sweet, very kind and a little bit shy and it was obvious to me from the first minute that she and my friend were very happy together.  We had a great dinner and it felt like she and I were really hitting it off as friends... and then they suggested we play a game of Trivial Pursuit.

I have a competition problem.  It's not a good thing and it's something I can't really control.  That night, I told myself to calm down, that it was only a game, that there were no medals going out to the winner and that maybe I should even throw the game and let my friend's girlfriend win, just to be nice.  Ten minutes later I was gleefully mocking her when she answered a music question wrong.  When I finally did win (I won! I won!) I was ecstatic... until I looked around and saw that the two of them were uncomfortable.  Some people just can't handle a ten-minute happy dance.  I went home shortly afterwards.

The Winter Olympics are bringing out the crazy competitor in me.  Every time someone wins a gold medal, there's a little voice in my head that says, "I could do that."  My fantasies are not normal.  They start with "Hey, maybe I'll try snowboarding" and move to imagining how I would wear my hair on the medal stand in less than a minute.  Would I mouth the words to the national anthem or just stand there looking proud?  Tears or no tears?  Decisions decisions.  

This has been a problem in the past.  When I started working out, and by working out I mean doing a fifteen minute mile on the treadmill, I immediately started imagining running a marathon.  The route would be lined with everyone who ever doubted me, from the kids who picked me last in gym class in fifth grade all the wya up to the women in the gym locker room who seemed to clear an unnecessarily wide berth when I walked past them.  They'd all be cheering and maybe even chanting, "We were wrong!  You win!  You win!"  Then of course I would win the marathon and my husband Brett Favre and I would go on a Hawaiian vacation to recover and mull my sponsorship offers from Nike.  I don't go small when it comes to these things, my friends.

There are some problems with these athletic dreams.  As much as I'd like to ignore the elephant in the room, I was not made to be an athlete.  In fact, it seems that my body was actually designed to trip and fall all over itself.  I'm very VERY pigeon-toed due to the fact that the bones in my legs are twisted inwards.  The most comfortable way for me to stand is this:

Now, I don't stand like that OFTEN, mostly because people look at me like I can twist my body around like that creepy girl from "The Ring," and typically I avoid that.  Still, though, if I don't concentrate on it, my feet turn in quite a bit, which may explain why I've fallen on treadmills, tripped in dining halls and crossed my skis and fallen on my face while attempting downhill skiing.  This trait is not one that's found in the world's great athletes, I'm sorry to say.  There's a reason I bought an elliptical machine: it separates your legs and keeps them firmly away from each other, something that I find has eliminated a lot of little, um, hiccups.

So I probably won't ever be a marathon runner or an Olympic athlete, unless they add events like "Full House' Trivia" or maybe "Identify the Voice of the Big Time Actor Doing Voiceover Work for Commercials."  It's probably a good thing because I could see myself cheering loudly against my competitors and maybe pointing and laughing if they failed.  I think that's probably, in general, frowned upon by the International Olympic Committee.