Yoda and I went to the park yesterday to throw a football around.  I confirmed two things during this outing.

First, it is still damnably hot in Georgia.

Second, I am horribly out of shape.

Yoda likes to invent games that somehow involve me going farther and farther to retrieve the ball.  At one point, he even suggested that we play a version of tag football, whereby I would have to run and tag him before he got to a certain point.

Run?

Honey, my runner broke a long time ago.  That mechanism has moved from the repair aisle and into the probably-will-have-to-be-replaced-at-some-time queue.  I don’t run.

Sitting on the couch last night with a warming pad on my back and wondering if I should be icing my throwing arm had me thinking about this sad state of affairs. How did it come to this?

Back in the dark ages of my youth, I loved to run.  Tag was pure joy, running and cutting sharp corners to avoid the touch of whomever was “it”.  I competed on track teams and ran in dashes.  The field would back up when I came to plate.  I would run just for the heck of it, not for the Jim Fixx exercise revolution of it (he died of a coronary after a run, you know).

But somewhere in the midst of adolescent angst and bodily changes, I lost my inclination to run.  Oh, I would run occasionally, playing a poor excuse of tag with my niece, nephews and eventually my own daughter, but nothing of my former running glory.

A couple of years ago I tried the whole running on the treadmill at the gym thing.  Yeah, didn’t like that activity.  Nothing worse than plodding along, nose dripping and sweat rivers all over then looking over and seeing one of those compact, spandex wearing, toned bodied yuppies running at twice my speed and still not mouth breathing.

Three surgeries on my foot haven’t helped my running cause either, but even without those I believe my runner would have remained broken.  It takes a lot to motivate me in that direction.

Days at the park sometimes have me wishing that I would do something about my broken runner.  The thought of the pure physical freedom to run without hesitation or fear of bodily injury does make me smile.  But the idea of what I’d have to do to accomplish it makes me shudder.

So, I shall continue to stock up on heating pads and pain relievers, listening to my Tin Man knees and doing the Quasimodo walk after sitting for more than five minutes, until I can stand them no more, which might be coming sooner than I thought.

Yoda just got two “real” baseball mitts.