Run to Paradox

I like running. I have to, I've been doing but run for the past two months. That isn’t strictly true. I haven’t really been running non-stop, its just that physical discomfort has become such a normal part of my life it seems like I’ve discovered the secret of keeping Shank’s pony in perpetual motion.

Truth be told, I average only about 100km/week on the hoof, which isn’t that much, really, and shouldn't be cause for stress. In fact, recent peer reviewed studies have concluded that a five kilometre run causes less stress to a reasonably fit person than a five course meal of pizza, burgers, fries, ice-dream and coke – diet coke, naturally – does to a disgusting fat body.

Further to that, another study has concluded that explaining to people why you want to be fit and healthy is easier than convincing people that you are grossly fat due to a gland problem and not because you are a lazy guts with zero self respect who insists that it is all the Government’s fault.

Actually, I just made that up, but it worked for Al Gore so I thought I’d give it a shot. It is certainly something to think about though, imagine the taxpayer cash you could hoover up from a gullible Government with a grant application  entitled: Climate Change and Obesity – The Cause and the Effect.

But, I digress. The standard answer I give to most people who stop me from running to enquire as to why I am, or rather was, running is that I am training for old age to ensure that I can be as fit and healthy as possible when I die.

This stops them in their tracks for long enough to allow me to run away and escape from their inane queries, thus allowing me to ruminate on more important puzzles, interrupted only by the occasional muted clatter of various bits of me finally shaking themselves loose and falling off.

Why, for example, do middle-class women of a certain age  - well past yummy mummy, but just short of old bag - assume that they have been granted sole usage rights to the footpath?

Normally found in pairs and dressed in the finest designer tracksuits Myer can import from China, they waddle stridently along, one each side of the path, elbows akimbo and noses skyward.

They can see you approaching, they can hear your “excuse me, please”, they know you don’t want to break stride … and they steadfastly refuse to budge an inch.

Training them out of this behaviour is easy: you simply pick up speed, splay your elbows and charge, but discovering why they do it? Who knows?

Of course, that is one of the minor conundrums of life. Contemplating other, deeper mysteries can distract the mind from the body’s pitiful protests as you push it up a particularly daunting hill.
Take the aforementioned Al Gore; if natural justice exists why is a science numpty, charlatan and fakir like Lizard-man possessor of untold millions and a Nobel Prize instead of spending his days posing questions such as “would you like fries with that?” or “do you want I should clean the bugs off the windshield?”

Does Tim Flannery actually believe the endless stream of rubbish he spouts and, if so, why isn’t he sitting in a patrolled recreation area having deep and meaningful conversations with an invisible rabbit and a man who insists that he really is Napoleon?

And those are just the up-hill questions. Once I’m back on the flat and dodging amorous peacocks, I have time to ponder other vexing conundrums.

What deranged cretin thought that Bill Two Knives Shorten would be an electoral winner? Who first came up with the idea of making Bimbo Plibersek deputy leader AND shadow foreign minister?

Apart from the fact that Billy Two Knives is going to have to go the Audie Murphy and stand on a box whenever the two of them appear at the same press conference, the party couldn’t have found a more miserable pairing if it tried.

I suppose the thinking behind Tanya Cats-Bum Face was that a woman was a good match for another woman in Liberal deputy and foreign minister Julie Bishop, but did nobody recognise the self-evident truth that Plibersick is to Bishop as crude oil is to unleaded petrol?

See what I mean? The miles fly by when you are wrestling with brain teasers like these. Of course, once you finish the flat section and reach the suspension bridge there are more.

Is that the heart attack you have been expecting or just a stitch?

Is that knocking noise that has been coming from your knee getting any worse, and if it is, will they fix it straight away or leave it parked out the back for two months waiting for the parts from Sydney?

Why do Chinese tourists – all toting cameras the size of howitzers - always stop en masse in the middle of the bridge while one of their number trots 100 metres away to take a group photo using his mobile phone?

Having made it to the top of Lungbuster Ladder, you can happily career downhill for a stretch wondering how long the ALP can insist on throwing millions of taxpayer dollars to manufacturing unions under the pretence it is helping the car industry?

Adam Bandt is sounding more like Christine Milne everyday. Is he taking a course of revolutionary secret drugs and testosterone treatments in order to complete the metamorphosis or just copying her delusional hysterics out of a sense of duty?

Is John Kerry Statler, or Waldorf, and who is operating him? Why is this hill steeper and higher than it was yesterday? If Americans wanted a smart president why didn’t they just elect Barry Obummer’s speechwriter instead of lame duck ventriloquist’s dummy they ended up with?

What was the origin of the expression ‘lame duck’ and if the duck was lame why didn’t it just fly instead?

Am I the only person in the world who thinks it hilarious that the Greenpeace bleating that its ‘activists’ are enduring “third world conditions” in a Russian slammer is the same Greenpeace that insists that the rest of us have to live in the same conditions in order to save Gaia?

Further to that, why are Climate Change evangelists called ‘progressives’ when they want to force us back to the stone-age?

Finally, how is it possible to twist an ankle while running in a straight line?