Sunday: day of rest, or day of waste? For me, it’s been more of the latter than the former, usually. And this morning I got up with no intention of doing anything. I wasn’t even going to work out on the treadmill, even though my last thought when I went to bed last night was that I needed to get on the thing, having skipped the workout yesterday. Okay, almost my last thought.

Then, along about the seventh inning or so this morning, the profound thought “why not?” wedged itself into my consciousness. So I strapped myself onto the treadmill and did twenty minutes at close to my top speed, and that was enough for me for a Sunday. I had to remind myself that I wasn’t even competing against myself, much less anyone else.

For some reason I write down each day’s total time and mileage and calories burned, and my top speed and top incline. For awhile I thought I had to improve every day in one category or another, but I soon realized what kind of madness that would be. So now I just do whatever feels right for that day. I shouldn’t even write the numbers down, but it’s an old habit.

It’s like when I was thirteen and listened to the top forty on Bobby Dale’s Friday afternoon show on KEWB and wrote down every song every week. That made sense to me at the time, but I was thirteen. Now I’m 48 weeks away from being 60. But I don’t listen to top forty radio any more anyway, as we’ve already established.

Another thing I had no intention of doing today was working in the yard. I know I said yesterday I should do it every day, but Sunday is one day I take liberties with that kind of commitment. Still, I did spend part of my afternoon pushing the mower around, and it felt pretty good. It felt better than it looks, as a matter of fact, because if you survey the yard, it doesn’t look as if I did much at all. Only you and I know better.