Me vs. Machine

Looking over my list of goals, it appears I stand a better chance of moving to Nashville WITH Jimmy Carter than I do of mastering the elliptical machines at the Y.

I've been on two different machines at two different locations, and I've been an "I Love Lucy" episode every time. 

In three days of workouts, I have fallen off the machine, knocked my phone off more times than I can count, gotten tangled in my earbuds, and tried to remove my fleece pullover with my earbuds still in my ears. I've stood on it, trying to figure out how to program something that has NO DIRECTIONS on it and talked to myself out loud. (I've also talked to the elliptical machine out loud to no avail - it's not coughing up its programming secrets). I've tried, nonchalantly, to look at my elliptical neighbors and see how THEIR machine are programmed, but I can't make them out. And they are pointedly ignoring me, perhaps even wishing I would just give it up and go home. (They obviously don't know me at all.)

I always forget to plug my earbuds into my phone and open Pandora until I get on the machine, then have to stand there and balance while pushing buttons on my phone (think balancing while having each foot in a different canoe). Because I don't have one of those cool arm bands to hold my phone, I have to tuck it into the waistband of my yoga pants (as yoga pants have no pockets). Then, at least once during my workout, sometimes more often, the phone works its way loose and falls down my pant leg, hanging by the earbud cord. Be assured there is NO graceful way to retrieve it.

I'm not going to go into the rest of the workout. How I forget that just because I can't hear anyone else while wearing the earbuds, they can certainly hear ME when I sing out loud. How, once you get the hang of the machine and think you're all bad ass, you find that you're panting after a minute and a half. And that each minute feels like about twenty. And that stopping is awkward at best, putting you squarely back in the feet-in-two-canoes scenario. And, if you forget that you have put your phone on the little ledge of the control panel because you were tired of fishing it out of your britches, then you might, MIGHT yank it off the ledge when you step off, violently popping the earbuds out of your ears and sending the phone crashing to the floor, usually landing right under the foot pedals.

I have only begun to fight.