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I think I may have passed away into the great by and by last night.

It all started with a walk to the Rec. No, wait, I guess it started a little bit before that. Hrm.

It all started with an AIM conversation between Nat and I. I ordered her to invite me to go to the Rec with her (without even knowing if she went to the Rec or not). She complied, and told me to meet her there at 5pm Thursday evening. So, yesterday after work, yesterday being Thursday and after work being 5pm, I made the short walk from East hall to the Rec.

As I neared the Rec, I started looking for Nat. This wasn’t as easy as it really should have been. You see, there’s some big competition known as the Odyssey of the Mind World Finals on campus right now, meaning there are lots of extra bodies on campus. Over a thousand of these extra bodies had decided to congregate in front of the Rec. I stopped in front of two different girls, smiled, and said hi. Unfortunately, neither were Nat. Eventually, I gave up trying to find her in the massive, colorful crowd, and headed inside.

Silly, smart Nat. She was inside waiting for me. We really should have planned better. I would have made fewer high school girls nervous.

I was at the Rec because I’m dreadfully out of shape, and I dreadfully want to be ~in~ shape. I figure an enormous, free (for students) recreational facility is a good place to start down that particular road. I’d only been to the Rec once before, and that was before I was even a freshman, during Orientation the early summer of 1999. Ironically (I suppose), I met Nat at this Orientation, and we snuck away that evening to the Rec to play racquetball.

We started out by jogging. Those of you who know me, know that I haven’t jogged since, well…

Okay, so I’ve never really jogged. This was the perfect opportunity to start, ya? A two mile jog, no big deal.

I think I died somewhere along that track. Two miles is a really, really long distance for someone who has never run unless chased, and usually even then preferred outwitting assailants to outrunning them. And I’d totally forgotten that I have asthma. Did you? I haven’t carried an inhaler since my freshman year. Sometime during my freshman year, I realized that as long as I didn’t get winded, my lungs wouldn’t shut down on me. And my natural aversion to most things physical took care of that ‘winded’ problem quite nicely. For literally twenty minutes after we finished jogging, I couldn’t catch my breath. Or feel my face. Or hear, really. I don’t know what that one was all about.

Eventually, though, I did catch my breath. And I survived. Today, my calves and my butt are sore, which must mean that I did something right. Therefore, I plan to do it again. Partially because I want to spend more time with my friends. Partially because I want to get in shape. Partially because when I weighed myself this morning, I was below 180 pounds again, which made me very happy. And partially because there were a dozen girls on that track wearing shorts that I would have considered too small for use as a towel to wipe the sweat from my brow. I’ll leave the determination as to the individual valuation of these variables to you. :)