Sweating out the stress

Sometimes I get stressed out. Today has been one of those days, and I have the three (possibly four, too early to tell) stress zits to prove it. Instead of carrying the weight of my world on my shoulders, I decided to channel it into weight vest (like a 40lbs) and take it for a run.

We all handle stress differently, some hit the fridge, others hit the bottle, some use retail therapy, I run. I credit stress making for making me a better runner, nothing like doing speed work and hills when you are pissed off, the thought almost makes me giddy. So today, me and figurative ‘weight vest’ hit the road. It didn’t take long for me to start forgetting about minor procedures that sound more like heart surgery, lifestyle logbooks, mortgage size car servicing bills, reinventing the wheel, gong shows, final exams, editors, peanuts, two functions this weekend and nothing to wear…By the end of song two it was all gone, it was now just me, my running glasses, the long sleeve that I shouldn’t have worn and my tunes.

Although my mp3 player is on shuffle, and there are over 100 songs to shuffle, there is a certain hill on my route where it seems like every time I climb it “Wanna Make a Memory” plays. You know when you hear a song and it reminds you of something? When I hear that song it even reminds me of that hill, it’s weird. Anyway, climbing the hill and what a surprise “Wanna Make a Memory” is the next song. It’s ok, I do enjoy the song, as well as Jon Bon Jovi, I think out of all rock stars, even movie stars, he has aged the best (sorry, Tommy, you might not have aged as well, but you will always be #1 to me), and that boy has lived. So climbing the hill, Jon singing to me, oh I am listening (might even be singing the melody to him while he writes a couple lines), we are making mem-or-ies…our moment is rudely interrupted when some d-bag driving a large diesel truck turns the corner a little too wide and too fast while talking on his cell, it’s not good enough that he almost ran me over, but he stepped on the gas just at the precise moment he passed me, so I inhaled his disgusting diesel exhaust. What the hell? Here I am handling my stress in a healthy way, I may as well have taken up smoking instead for the next two years with all of that crap I just ingested. If this had happened at the beginning of my run I would have probably thrown my water bottle at his truck, but with my new found inner peace I let it go, calm blue waters, no hairy eyeball, no wag of the finger. The moment was interrupted but not ruined. Jon and I finished the song, I don’t even remember what came next, it didn’t matter, my world was back in balance.

I finished my run, calmly walked up my driveway, stretched and returned to my reality feeling a whole lot better than I did before I left.