…And the treadmill wins it.

…And the treadmill wins it.

One year for Christmas I gave myself a membership to a local gym and started going every day during our Christmas break from school.  I quickly made friends with some other ladies my age, you know, elderly and we kind of hung together since we move slower than the younger set.  There was a guy there every day.  His name was Chad and he was the most obnoxious, conceited insufferable douche-canoe you could ever imagine.  He is the type of guy who thinks he’s better and smarter than everybody else and starts fights with smaller guys to try and look macho.  He was tolerated by some and abhorred by many. Especially me, because my first day there I walked into, and knocked over, the Christmas tree in the yoga area.  I guess I ruined their Zen and Chad made fun of me insinuating that I was stupid, old and decrepit.  I especially loathed him.

At the end of my first week at the gym something delightful happened.  I was on that machine that lifts you up in the air when you pull on the handles, but I had forgotten the counter weights so I could not go back down and was stranded up in the air.  The trainer was trying to help me get down when in pranced Chad bedecked in his Nike Therma® Training pants, otherwise known as black sweatpants, and his Nike Element Sleeveless Performance Hoodie which is a just black hoodie with the sleeves cut off, but this one costs $55 at Nordstrom. We all knew this because he bragged all the time about his wardrobe including the price tag. He had ear buds on and was singing loudly to some dumb hipster song.  People around him were rolling their eyes and moving to machines that were far, far away from Chad.  He spotted me as the trainer was helping me down and snickered shaking his head as if I was the most pathetic thing he had ever seen.  I wanted to slap him, but I couldn’t move that fast since the squats I had been doing made it hard to even tie my shoes that morning.

We all watched as Chad got on the treadmill to warm up.  Of course he cranked it up to top speed with the incline almost all the way up.  After a minute or two he either decided that the sweatshirt was too hot, or wanted to show off his abs (my guess is the later).  In any event he tried to take it off and that’s when the fun began.  In typical Chad fashion, he was not about to get off the treadmill because he was Chad the magnificent and would just rip it off without missing a beat, so he tried pulling the sweatshirt off over his head while still running. This did not work out so well for Chad.

Once his eyes were completely covered by the sweatshirt, he became disoriented, stumbled, and lost his balance.  He stopped running abruptly which was a poor choice because the treadmill did not stop.  He couldn’t pull his arms back down to grab the rails on the treadmill because they were stuck inside the sweatshirt still covering his head. Chad shot off the back of the treadmill like a rocket and smashed into the drywall behind the machines.  I’d never seen anyone move so fast. He fell to the floor.  By this time, he had gotten his arms free which were now straight up in the air. He began rolling around, his head still covered by the sweatshirt, he tried to get up, stepping on, and crushing his fancy iPhone in the process. It cost $850.

And then he just laid there motionless for a second or two.  We all held our breath as the gym went so completely silent that you could hear a pin drop. There was no sound at all except for the whirring of the still speeding treadmill.  Once we realized that he was, for the most part, unhurt we laughed until our sides hurt.

He gradually got up and pulled the sweatshirt back down, his hair standing straight up, his face bright red, and still gasping for air.  He looked sheepishly around the room, then picked up his crushed iPhone and limped out of the building.  They have since fixed the hole in the drywall, but we haven’t seen Chad since the day he went airborne.

I would venture to say that the point, set and match went to the treadmill that day.  The rest of us haven’t had to endure his annoying presence and Chad got the giant dose of humility that he so badly needed.  Everybody wins!