A few weeks ago, I needed to go for a swim on a Sunday. I intended to do it during the day, but suddenly it was 4PM and I hadn’t gone. I made a plan with Wiley to go after dinner. Then I stalled. I put Helen to bed, and made the mistake of lying down with her. Evening exercise death sentence. In the ten minutes of back rubbing in a dark room with fake rain sounds emanating from the white noise machine, I nearly fell asleep myself. It was 7:30. As I lay there I tried to talk myself into going to the gym. Often on the team we talk about how what we go through in our training is nothing compared to what cancer patients go through. Usually this works at motivating me. Chemo, Janet, I thought to myself. Beth went through chemo. Nothing doing. I had plans to go to the gym the very next morning, to attend a spinning class. Wouldn’t that suffice? Did I have to go there now too?
Then I thought of many years ago, when Beth and Kevin were members of the same gym I still belong to. We used to go workout in the evenings together. At least once, Beth and I drove there in a winter downpour, couldn’t find parking, and drove home without working out. I was more motivated than that now, wasn’t I?
In the end, two things got me out of Helen’s bed and into my car, then the cold pool. The first was that I thought about you, my three readers. Do I really want to write about how I wimped out? I thought. Or how I triumphed over my own laziness? The second thing was that I remembered something nice about the pool at my gym: There’s a hot tub there.
So I swam, and I soaked. Both felt great. As I could have predicted, I did not regret going to the gym. I never do.
Another good part of the evening happened on the way home. I needed to stop for milk and cereal for the morning. Fearing that our local beer-and-milk store, Durn Good Grocery, would be closed, I stopped at J’s Mart (not to be confused with K’s Mart further down the street, or, more out of the way, the Hop-In or Plaid Pantry. I love the names of the 7-11 alternatives in Seattle.) The man behind the counter directed me to the one milk option, quarts of Dairigold. I flashed on a memory of a friend from my first library job, Ahmed. Ahmed immigrated to Seattle from Somalia a year or two before I met him. Ahmed has a perpetual full-face grin every time I see him, and a delight in the aspects of American culture that many of us who grew up here find mundane.
Once Ahmed came to visit me when I worked at the Skyway Library. We went to 7-11 during my break, and he got a cup of coffee. He inquired about getting a splash of milk for his coffee, and the cashier handed him an open container of Dairigold. You’d have thought he’d been handed the Hope Diamond.
"Dairigold, Janet!” he said, holding it aloft. “Local cows, working hard!” This last was a reference to an ad campaign featuring DairiGold cows performing tasks such as snowboarding and waterskiing.
The swim would have been worth it just for that memory alone.
As the cashier at J’s Mart was ringing me up, he sighed and looked at the clock. 9:50.
“Ten more minutes and I get to go home.” I asked him where home was and he said “Marysville.” That’s a good forty-five minutes from Seattle. “And when do you have to be back?” I asked.
“Tomorrow morning at 6:00.”
And I was complaining about having to make back-to-back trips to my gym to workout? Don’t let me do that again, three readers.
[Yeah, a lot of that was only tangentially related to training. But you guys don’t mind, right?]
I’ve been meaning to have a weekly “thank you” section for donors. I hope the fact that I’ve neglected to do that until now doesn’t imply a lack of gratitude on my part. I’m hugely thankful for every donation, large or small, that I receive. Even though the money goes, not to me but to LLS, I take it personally, and feel an emotional jolt of energy each time I get a donation or even just a word of encouragement from a friend. It feels like everyone is cheering me on.
There’s Clem, the owner of a B&B on the Big Island where we spent 4 days in 2007, who has given me $100 both times I’ve done Team in Training events. There’s Beth and Kevin’s families, who have lost too many family members to cancer, and have been very supportive both financially and emotionally. There’s my cousin Bob who included a note with his check that simply said “Good luck, Janet. Kick Ass.” (I’m keeping that note on my desk even after my race is finished, Bob.) Beth and I shared the same dentists, a husband-and-wife team. Last week they sent me a $250 check. Yes, I got $250 from my dentist. I could go on. It’s all overwhelming, in the best way. Thank you all.
1 comment:
Nice post Janet. Keep the hard work. I just heard a Sports Psychologist at evening community meeting say, "The hardest part about being good is being good every day." Bob Tewksbury, former major leaguer.
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