I admit, I wimped out

Saturday morning dawned cold & icky (a scientific term). It was raining/icing steadily, and I made the call that it would be silly to put myself through another long run in miserable weather. Plus, parts of the sidewalk by my house were slippery enough that I nearly went toes over ass while walking on them. Thus to the gym I went, to complete twelve grueling miles on the treadmill. Shudder. Yuck. Blarg. I really hate when I have to restart the treadmill. I don't know if this is a 24 Hour Fitness thing or is universal, but all the treadmills at the gym have a max of 60 minutes per session. Even if I do a separate warm-up, that's a max of 6 miles, give or take a few tenths. Ergo, if I want to do more than 6 miles I have to let the treadmill come to a complete stop, furiously press the "restart" and "speed up" buttons, and try to get back into the groove I was so ignominiously booted out of. I realize that in the grand scheme of Life's Inconveniences this one ranks pretty low, somewhere in the vicinity of changing the oil in your car, but way below flossing or the stomach flu. Still. Oh, and another thing I've come to dislike about doing long runs at the gym is that I get funny looks from people while swallowing gels. I get that most people on the treadmill at the gym are walking or running 2 or 3 miles, and have most likely never run long enough to need a gel. I get that it might be weird to see the gal next to you trying to subtly ooze some goo out of a tube into her sweaty face while simultaneously trying not to fall off the back of the treadmill into the guy behind her. But do ya gotta stare?

To look on the bright side of the gym thing, I wasn't on one of the machines that faces the wall, and I got to watch most of Paycheck, a completely forgettable action movie from the 90s that I vaguely remember seeing at the drive-in with my two best friends in high school. We went to see it because we had a thing for Ben Affleck, who spends the entire movie looking like an insurance salesman with tanorexia and a pomade fixation.