The Stickman Chronicles: P90X

One of the fitness nuts at work offered to loan me her P90X workout DVDs.  I am gratuitously inserting my virtual fitness group leader’s link here.  They have catchy names like “plyometrics,”  which mean nothing to me.  It’s sort of like “retsyn” in Certs.  Seriously, what the hell is “retsyn, and why do I care that it’s in there?”  It probably causes cancer or maybe warts.  To make P90X more interesting, these videos all come with a full screen of warning:

You will experience pain not felt since the inquisition.  You could die while working out to these videos.  In fact, everyone who has ever tried to do more than two of these videos in one day is now dead.  

Not having a clue, I put in the one called “Ab-ripper.”  Who doesn’t want ripped abs? Being the Taylor Lautner wannabe that I am, I attack this 20-minute workout video with a passion.

It didn’t take me long to discover that the name of this episode had been poorly chosen.  It should have been “Flesh-render,”  “Meatgrinder,” or perhaps “Soul-destroyer.”  I doubt that these names sell workout videos, though.

The next third of an hour was spent performing unnatural contortion rituals while listening to this guy Tony yap like a stupid magpie.  I wanted to jump up and put some old school karate throat-punch on this guy, but that would have broken the television and more importantly, involved one extra crunch that wasn’t in the video.  I finally hit the mute button so my family wouldn’t hear me screaming at him to shut up.  With expletives.

When I finally decided to make the effort to peel myself off the floor, I can only describe what followed as a religious experience, as illustrated by the profession I uttered on the way up, “Oh, Jesus, god, holy-crap!”

I didn’t hurt the next morning, but every muscle from my armpits to my knees was simply on vacay.  I was forced to sit down while putting on my pants, lifting a leg up with one hand while I put it in my pants with the other.

Shoes.  I have described shoes as the root of everything that is wrong with society, and I felt the same way on this particular morning, because I couldn’t get them on.

It was there, my plain black leather Docker dress shoe, right by my foot, but it might as well have been a mile away, taken there by that guy who always wants to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.

As I sat in my armchair, I was able to lift my foot, and of course I could bend down to grasp my shoe, but I could not do both.  It wasn’t a matter of enduring the pain. I simply could not do it.  I had to lift my foot into my lap and put the shoe on it from there.

Three days later, I could dress myself without assistance.  There was nothing about that in the warning.  Approach this series with caution.