12WBT - Day 1 - The Sky Is Falling

At approximately 6.10am this morning, my lovely 6 month old, chubby cheeked and oh! so cuddly, ample thighed daughter (no resemblance - clearly takes after her father) woke me by gently caressing my face and cooing something that sounded more than remotely like babytalk for "I love you", which I am sure is exactly what she meant.

I looked down at her and smiled and told her I loved her, too.  More heart-melting babytalk in response.

Ah, perfect.  

No, this was the WORST POSSIBLE THING THAT COULD HAVE HAPPENED.

I had reached over to my 'smartphone'.  So smart that it failed to wake me at 5.30am.  I studied it.  Very hard (it takes a while without coffee).  Oh.  5.30 PM.  Human input error.  

"Love, it's 6.10am.  Please take Bubs."

"You can't go out.  It's raining".  

"No it's not."

"Well you're too late.  Go tomorrow."

"Nooooooooo!"  I had to think fast.  "I'll go for a half an hour".

I may have thrown the baby at my husband as I ran out of the bedroom.  I poured myself into my trackies (don't tell me that I'm the only fattie who refuses to buy fat person clothes) and burnt approximately 57 calories squeezing and manipulating my G cups (not for your titillation, people; we all know that there comes a point where it's more Rocky Horror than porn) into my sports bra, which, as those similarly endowed would know, was worn over my regular made-of-actual-cement chastity-bra.  Successfully put on T-shirt (again, memories of a slender yester-year) and sneakers (likewise very old, but remarkably pristine in condition).  Then, I walked out the door.

I'm trying to celebrate the little things.  So it's important that I walked out the door, ok?

My first challenge was to unlock the gates.  We're currently living with my parents.  I'm 39.  So my parents are old people.  In the last month or so that I have lived with my parents, I have not found a single cliche about old people not to ring true.  Testimony to this is that it took me a full ten minutes to escape from my own parents house, as it involved unlocking several gates and heaving them open (honestly: surely at least another 57 calories burned).

Having found freedom from Alcatraz, I swam for my life.  That is really how it felt, trying to walk briskly in the downpour.  Yes, it had resumed raining.  Quite hard, really.

Then something unusual happened.  I started to run.  Or fat people's version of running, anyway, which is how I used to run even when I was slim, which is to say, I jogged and tried not to look too silly despite not really knowing what to do with my hands.  I did the 30 second / 1.30 minute thing (approximately, of course; you'll learn that I'm not one of Those Organised People).  After doing it five times, I did it twice more.  Uphill.

It felt good.

I got to the top of the hill, which is, in my parents' neighbourhood, a main road.  So I thought I may as well run a little more, after all, it was downhill.  Weeeeee, I was flying, I was flying!  I WAS FLYING!

Oh, that was hard and rather sudden.  I was on my arse.  Imagine how skinny people must feel when they land hard on their arse bones, without all that nice cushioning, I thought to myself.  But then, they wouldn't land so hard, because they're lighter, like feathers, and so they'd kind of float to Mother Earth.  

Note to self: avoid slippery manhole thingies at least until you can flap your fairy wings and gracefully float over them.

Thankfully, people in this neighbourhood are all slack and, to my surprise, I had not been joined by 1000s of 12wbt'ers.  There might have been one other of us, but I couldn't be sure.  He looked like he was in his own private world of pain, and so it didn't matter.  And other than him, it was just me and a few cars.  

The rest of the walk (there were no more overeager attempts to get a gold star in running on the beginner lose-that-lard program) was quite uneventful, with each minute distinguishable from the last only in terms of whether it rained like the sky was falling in or merely like the clouds were going to crush me.

I arrived home to find hubby very angry indeed.  "You said half an hour! It's 7.20am!" 

"Oh, is it?".  I was in that buoyant state of happiness that can only come with exercise.  "Here Bubs, let's have a cuddle".