Gyms, Jack of All Trades, and Existential Happiness

My priest is an odd duck. He will probably end up on this blog a few times, so, we shall call him Tom.

Fr. Tom…is sort of the Dr. Aikman of blue collar work. He has done almost every form of construction known to mankind. He can build a chicken coop in less than four hours, make a knife from scratch the old fashioned way (complete with anvil), he can construct a stained glass window, and wire any sort of building. I think the list of things he can’t do is a lot shorter than the list of things he can. Yeah, if you sense awe and amazement in that last sentence, I pretty much am.

Anyhow, somehow or other I ended up joining his gym. And he has the most robust form of encouragement I’ve ever encountered. The kind that watches you sweat through your three sets of fifteen reps on the hellacious machine, then looks at you and tells you, “do another five, and another round on all of them, you aren’t exhausted enough yet.” And lo and behold, you go and do them, and quite aside from being utterly dead, you feel exhilarated and empowered. At the end of the day, you aren’t sure if you are being tortured or made better, but, the two look so much alike, who can really tell?

Anyhow, by some odd interchange of cause and effect, I am becoming just a bit of a gym freak, and I’ve made an interesting sort of discovery. Mind does take precedence over matter. I’m not a runner. I haven’t run more than twenty minutes at a go since I was fourteen. And that twenty minutes of running is usually punctuated by many bewailings of severely pained ankles, knees, and lungs.

So, I was contemplating that as long as I was going to a gym, and more specifically, whatever gym Fr. Tom happened to be at, that the treadmill was going to be an increasingly time-consuming part of my life—and the knowledge did not thrill me. After trying pretty much everything—music, books on tape, tv, and conversation to take my mind off of sore legs, I had a brilliant idea. I discovered that while reading a book on a treadmill is next to impossible, reading a kindle on a treadmill is fairly easy. So, one investment in a kindle, and an hour downloading free books later, I am sweating on a treadmill while re-reading De Tocqueville.

Upshot, while listening to music, I can run for 22 minutes. While reading, I can go 45. 