Patience, Grasshopper.

Just cause you got the monkey off your back doesn’t mean the circus has left town.
George Carlin

When last we left our struggling heroine, she was confronted with the specter of a summer spent swinging in a hammock, reading dull novels while wearing ugly shoes. Understandably, this image struck fear into her heart: fear of weight gain, muscle atrophy, a lapsed subscription to In Style magazine and (gasp!) boredom. Did she survive? Well…

I tried. I really, really tried. Within minutes of posting my last blog entry I was en route to the bookstore with the intention of purchasing and reading at least one verbose Russian novel.

First mistake: forgetting that my once impressive intellect has been siphoned off into my children’s brains through some bizarre placental transfer that I do not fully understand. Consequently, the bright shiny book covers at the store entrance captured my attention so completely that I never ventured beyond to the distant shelves of arcane and dusty tomes. Instead I chose a pretty embossed book from the top of the pile whose 100 pages were filled with very cute, very short, very chicky lit.

Second mistake: stopping at the shoe store on the way home. They don’t count as heels if they’re platforms, right? I must have left the book there, because I haven’t seen it since. Anyway, who these days has the attention span to read anything longer than a status update?

Since I had nothing to read and no hammock (all the best hammock trees were downed this summer to free up light for the solar panels), I decided to take up kick boxing to while away my spare hours. My reasoning was simple and elegant. I spend half of my life at the karate studio anyway, why not get a work out in while I am there? That pesky little injury was inconsequential, as it was on the non-kicking side of my foot.

This may be a good time to point out that I am not, by any sense of the word, violent. The few experiences I have had in carrying and/or firing weapons left my hands shaking and my head filled with nightmares. I have searched in vain for the tattoo on my forehead that announces to all the world: “Nice person lives inside this head.” Supermarket cashiers tell me their life stories, stray animals beat a path to my door, and I burst into tears every single time I hear that dreaded Titanic song. You know the one.

But…put a set of boxing gloves on me and something very frightening happens. Turns out that I am really very good at beating the stuffing out of things. Turns out, too, that I actually enjoy beating the stuffing out of things. Guess I’ve been carrying around a bit more aggression than I thought. I blame the clown for this.

The upshot is that while laid up by my foot injury, I lost six pounds and gained an almost six-pack set of abs.   A four-pack if you will, versus my usual two liter bottle. Relaxation is relative.

My summer was proceeding along swimmingly, what with my Axmen tryouts and Linda Hamilton impersonations, when a critical piece of news came my way. The news was delivered via my podiatrist, he of the well decorated office, after he perched me upon an expensive looking dove-gray computerized foot pad to measure me for inserts that would allegedly fix my bio-mechanically unsound left foot. The audible alarms given off by the computer when I stepped upon the foot pad must have clued him in that something was seriously out of whack.  Turns out that one of my legs (the left) is longer than the other. Significantly so. In a flash, I saw that the differential leg length explains everything: the right hip injury, the left foot fracture, the stressed right IT band and, funny I never noticed this before, the Quasimodo gait.

Like most silver linings, this piece of news came with a few storm clouds. The good news? In these days of wondrous technological advances, this is fixable. I have a brand new set of inserts that will end my days of Quasimodinous forever (the purchase of which no doubt provided my podiatrist with a new sofa for his waiting room). The bad news? For the next few months I am more susceptible to stress fractures than ever while my body realigns to the new bio-mechanical forces. To avoid injury, I’m building up the miles like a novice: 4 miles, then 5, then 6, and so on.

The really big news though, is that Dana-Farber is once again going to allow me to attach my name to theirs for the purpose of raising a few bucks for cancer research (thereby proving once and for all that no one from that fine organization has ever read this blog). Mark your calendars for April 19th, 2010. Six months to whip myself into Boston Marathon shape.  Hi-ya!!

The plan (and don’t I always have one?):

1) switch it up with a new training program
2) focus on nutrition, nutrition, nutrition
3) don’t be an idiot

182 days…

In the meantime, no need to be shy about being the first to donate.  My DFMC site is already up and running (ha ha).

The goal is $8000 this year.

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