"You must be flossing..."

Saturday, July 3, 2010

Temperatures were on the rise. We were looking at 90’s for the next bunch of days and I was not looking forward to running it the heat, which would be painful, but not as bad as the visit to the dentist’s for teeth cleaning that morning, would be.

I mean…it’s not the cleaning or anything else they do…it’s the lady that does it. She’s nice and all, but I just know what it’s going to be. She’s going to ask me a couple of questions about the weather…”it’s hotter n’ shit out there and I hate it…” and then she’s going to stick her hands in my mouth and ask me how the kids are doing.

“…they’re glourf mnth ogglel blanth maa omth…” is all that comes out. But that doesn’t stop her, because she actually went to a hygienist school where they teach them to understand gibberish as a second language. I imagine she does the same thing when she goes out to dinner…reaches across the table and sticks her fist in your mouth before you can answer a question.

“You’re teeth and guns look fan-TASTIC! You must be flossing EVERY day,” she exclaims.

“Yeah…well...actually… after every meal,” I say, which is a lie since I never floss, but I don’t want her to lose faith in her supposed ability to know these things by looking in someone’s mouth. I do brush a lot, though.

I get out of there and head for home, calling John to tell him that I don’t have to pick up Heidi and he can come early for our workout. It’s going to be a bike or a hike, though I’m thinking a hike since he’s still in the recovery phase of his near-death experience with stomach ulcers. I know he’ll whine about losing three gallons of blood and all about half way up ‘The Lung’ if we ride and I don’t think I can take that. I would counter with “Yeah? Well I just had a teeth cleaning from ‘Fist In Your Mouth’. Top that!” He wouldn’t.

When he arrived, we sat around the kitchen table and talked. Savannah and Marie joined us and we revered them with stories of the Adirondacks. Savannah shared how she had come in at 6 a.m. that morning…having accidentally fallen asleep at her girlfriends house.

“…and when I checked my phone to see how concerned my parents were because I wasn’t home…well…there was no message. They’d slept through it all!”

Get over it. We’ve got three other kids…one is expendable. Anyway, we decided that biking was not in John’s best interest and headed for the Metroparks. I had my sixty-pound pack to carry and John loaded up with…a water bottle…which he stuck in my pack once we started.

We managed a decent hike of 70 minutes, though I didn’t stop for any step-ups. I really need to do some because I am thinking of climbing before the end of the month, though I have feeling I will do extremely well as a result of all the conditioning. John had little trouble with the hike, but he did tell me that he was pretty exhausted later. Stomach ulcers and low blood iron will have that affect.

Hike duration: 70 minutes.

Training Heart Rate: 90.

Calories burned during workout: 700.