The Treadmill

I was in a hotel up North last weekend and due to the weather, the roads, the uncertainty of the routes and the time I was reduced to the hotel’s gym and treadmill. Having basked on open roads, forest paths, urban fields and quiet lanes for the last five months running five miles on a treadmill was utter anathema to me. While I might have been kept dry from the driving rain outside the monotony of it was almost heart-breaking.

So to keep my mind off things at least for the first half after I had finished deciding what shade of white the walls were painted I thought of other things that are mind-numbing:

·         Watching paint dry.

·         Watching a wall being paint.

·         Palm Sunday when you’re 5.

·         5-day test cricket (when you don’t understand cricket).

·         A filibuster

·         Palm Sunday when you’re 12.

·         Waiting at that red-light near Blanchardstown Shopping Centre (substitute as necessary) at Christmas time.

·         Yesterday’s porridge.

·         Cemetery Sunday when the nun home from the missions goes on a solo-run with the decades of the rosaries.

·         A doctor’s waiting room when your phone is dead, the radio is dead, the last Now magazine is 5 years old and you’ve already read about the dangers of this year’s winter flu.

·         Palm Sunday any time really.

Monday’s training

An hour and 18 minutes. Roughly 16 k.