The Fall Is Going to Kill You

We joined a new gym in Riverside. It’s closer, cheaper, and without religious overtones/undertones. It’s also pretty bare bones. It has no extras and limited space. I don’t mind it but MJ might decide we need to go back to the Y. I hit the new gym for the first time last Sunday evening right before dusk. Since it’s less than a mile away I ran there. I did my chest and triceps, doing my best to work around the lack of equipment variety that I’m used to. When I was done I started to run back home. Running there was easy; running home wasn’t, for several reasons. First, I was exhausted. Second, the sun had gone down. Third, the sidewalk was jagged. And finally, gravity is constant. I was pushing myself to get home quickly. I figured it’s less than a mile, so I could tough it out. No one told my legs because they failed to pick up my foot high enough to clear a literal bump in the road and it was dark so I couldn’t see anything. This is where gravity took over. Walking on two legs instead of four has paid massive evolutionary dividends over the past 2 million years for us Homo sapiens. Unfortunately, we had to give up a whole bunch of balance and agility. My foot caught the crack in the sidewalk and I began to fall. As time slowed down I thought, “No big deal. I’ll tuck and roll into the fall when my hands hit the pavement just like I’ve done since I was five years old.” I didn't account for the fatigue in my arms, and when my hands hit the pavement my they failed me almost completely. All I could do was marginally slow my fall as my head sped towards the cement. I thought, more phlegmatically than one would expect, that I was going to certainly smash my bottom front teeth out and most likely shatter my chin. It didn’t occur to me that it was 8:30 Sunday night, I was dressed in a black shirt with dark gray shorts, and nobody would find me until Monday morning. But the universe’s sense of humor isn’t quite that dark so I missed the cement sidewalk and the concrete plant pot holding the pine tree, AND nobody saw me do it. I escaped with a slightly skinned hand and still made it home in less than nine minutes.