Once D.C. turns cold, I bring my workout routine to Yates. What I have learned from my time spent there, though, is not the secret to great abs, but rather that Yates is a place of strange occurrences. If you have ever heard the barbaric cries from the varsity weight room or thought a man lying next to you on the mats was dead (is that just me?), you know what I’m talking about.
I was doing sit-ups on the mats by the track. I don’t like sit-ups, so I couldn’t have been there very long. My iPod had me in a happy little post-treadmill world listening to Madonna’s “Like A Prayer.” Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a hand waving, and a person of the opposite gender approaching. Was the hand wave for me? I pointed to myself to make sure he was in fact waving at me. He nodded. He indicated the affirmative. I tried to place him. Were we in Women’s Studies together? Unlikely. Did I meet him after I had a little too much to drink? Doubtful. I quickly concluded that I didn’t know this boy.
I took off my headphones expecting him to ask me if I was using the medicine ball to my right. Instead, the question that came out of his mouth was, “Do you want to run a race?”
“Excuse me?” I said.
“Do you want to run a race?” he said more slowly.
“You mean, like, around the track?” I replied.
“Yes,” he said, as if this were common.
“You mean like me against you?” I was so confused.
“Yes,” he said, starting to look nervous.
“No,” I said. I didn’t.
“Why not?” he asked.
“Because that is just weird and dumb,” I thought.
“Well, you look like you would be a good runner,” he said as a last resort.
To me ‘good runner’ was the equivalent of ‘big thighs.’ “No. really, that’s okay,” I said, and the conversation was over. As I laid back down and continued my pathetic excuses for sit-ups, a thought occurred to me: was ‘Do you want to run a race’ a pick-up line? Oh my God, it was. That weird utterance was his pick-up line, and he probably thought he was being creative. What had happened to the good old days of the cheesy, cliché and shameless, “Do you have a map … because I just got lost in your eyes?” Granted, both of these lines are absurd, but at least the latter is recognizable.
Maybe my response was a little harsh. Maybe I should have run the race. Maybe I should have recognized this attempt for what it was and rewarded the effort. Or maybe the best thing would have been to keep my headphones on, do some real sit-ups and avoid yet another strange Yates occurrence.
