Read, will you? I think not.
If you have ever owned, touched, or been in the same room as a cat, you know that they love nothing more than to pay a great deal of attention to people who don’t want to be bothered. Cats are renowned for their ability to trip you, tangled themselves up in your legs, or be a general physical nuisance. Simple activities like reading a book or cooking pasta become obstacle course sports.
If I have to walk through my house with my laptop I do so with the care of a man carrying around a sandwich box of nitroglycerin. There’s not a day that goes by without a tangled collision in the hallway followed by an incredulous meow meant to convey: Watch where you’re going, bub!
It’s for this reason that I do my workout behind closed doors. The workout includes many exercises that would simply invite a cat’s attention and surely her interference and then probably lead to one or both of us bleeding or heading to an emergency room.
Today, as I began my workout in the muggiest room on Earth I notice a small head come out from behind my armchair. My workout is a timed thing that can’t really be paused, so I decide to risk it.
You are surely familiar with pushups, well pushups to a cat is the garage door game you used to play if you were an adventurous (and stupid) kid. Can you get out of the way before it comes down?!
The answer, by the by, is no.
Crunches are that awful exercise in which a person is forced to crunch his belly in order to look better at the beach. This one seemed to thwart the B Monster’s ability to bother me, until she started playing the Let’s see how close can I get my ass to owner’s face game. This added a dimension so crucial to crunches.
Lunges, steps onto chair, squats, and high knees running are essentially adventure games for cats. There is no descriptive term for how interested in these activities the cat became. Fortunately, she felt compelled to run in between and under my legs with each step.
I found it lovely that to a morning of extreme heat, along with the stress of being two hours from flight time, and working out in a small room after a weekend of beer, my cat decided to add dexterity and coordination challenges as well as apoplexy.
Since it is just before I leave for two weeks, I took it as the B Monster’s personal way of saying goodbye and I’ll miss you and have a nice trip. Pun totally intended.
