I have never paid atten­tion to those lit­tle warn­ing mes­sages. You know, the fine print at the bot­tom of the con­trols that basi­cally tell you, "Hey dip­shit, don't kill your­self, m'kay?" Okay, well maybe I read them but that doesn't mean I ever heed the advice.

1:45am. The sur­round­ings were dark, save for the sin­gle floures­cent light above my head. The room silent but for the fan slowly blow­ing cool air around the room — the Blue­tooth head­set "gen­tly" stream­ing Jimmy Eat World into my left ear from my phone only a few feet away. I was sweat­ing like a pig.

And there I was, finally get­ting around to doing what I told myself I would do years ago, what I pub­licly decreed I would do almost a year ago.

Finally, water­bot­tle in hand, scared shit­less, I walked my fat ass down to the exer­cise cen­ter in my apart­ment com­plex, unlocked the door, turned on the light and fan, and started work­ing the machines.

As I ran, I glanced down at the warn­ing mes­sage, in its omi­nous, all-red-and-caps script, and laughed to myself. "Com­mon sense," I thought. That phrase had such a dif­fer­ent mean­ing than it had just five days prior. Rel­a­tive, the idea.

Between con­cen­trat­ing on the stor­age closet directly in front of me and the clock just above and cen­tered on the wall, I remem­ber think­ing, "I'm sup­posed to be in Atlanta right now," but this, as with many of my inten­tions that week, didn't quite hap­pen as planned.

That's why I was there.

I had (and have) no one to blame but myself, and so I fig­ured that there was no bet­ter way to: 1) start mak­ing good on the promises stated almost a year ago, and 2) find a good way to let out some of the frus­tra­tion by kick­ing my own ass. I find it hys­ter­i­cal that this man­aged to accom­plish both of those goals at the same time when con­sid­er­ing that both goals are on such oppo­site ends of the spec­trum, but there I was any­way. What­ever gets the job done, I guess. I didn't have any more friends at this point any­way, so this seemed as good an activ­ity as any.

I'd say that I got a runner's high, but I don't think that's accu­rate. It would prob­a­bly be more cor­rect to say that I ran too hard and too fast and my mind, chest and stom­ach couldn't keep up with the pace and just gave up. Yeah, that sounds about right. That's where the dizzi­ness and the nau­sea hit.

Actu­ally see­ing spots isn't what it's cracked up to be.

I was diag­nosed with asthma when I was a small child. The doc­tors weren't sure where it came from as nei­ther my father nor my mother had it, but it's not as if that really mat­tered any­way. I had it, and that was enough infor­ma­tion for me.

I was told that the degree of asthma was very mild and wouldn't really affect me. I wouldn't need an inhaler or any other med­ica­tion — it would only come up if I really exerted myself and in that case, I should just take it easy.

Yeah, now I remem­ber the advice. Where was that lightning-quick mem­ory when I was run­ning so hard that I was sure my heart would lit­er­ally jump out of my chest?

And what did I do after that? Well, after about fif­teen min­utes of catch­ing my breath, of course I got on the weight machines and attempted to do var­i­ous lifts, both low and high-impact. What was the harm, right? Start things off with a bang, right? Set the bar high, right?

The next morn­ing I real­ized that I made some fun­da­men­tally painful mis­takes. For one, I had not done any type of stretch­ing either before or after the run­ning or the lift­ing. This mis­take is prob­a­bly the one that will res­onate the loud­est if I try this sort of shit again, because after about three sec­onds after I woke up, I real­ized that the mus­cles in my fore­arms were so sore and stiff that I lit­er­ally could not extend my arms beyond a ninety-degree angle for over three days.

Poral­y­sis — just great! Fuck­ing moron.

My legs had sim­i­lar sore­ness, but the pain wasn't nearly as severe. I had really fucked up here, and it scared me. I was so con­cen­trated on releas­ing the frus­tra­tion and anger I had from the pre­vi­ous week's events that I really hadn't stopped to think about the prac­ti­cal­i­ties of exer­cis­ing cor­rectly. It really is a trial-by-fire, as I've never done this kind of stuff before.

I haven't been back to the exer­cise room since that night, and at this point I'm very dis­cour­aged. Any­one who knows me knows that I don't like to admit not know­ing how to do some­thing but I've got to say that at this junc­ture, I'm in way over my head and I don't know what to do next or how to do it. I mean, if I have to live with a gut just to avoid episodes like that hor­ri­ble Fri­day night, I will find a way to make peace with it. I won't like it, but it's bet­ter than pass­ing out in a vacant room in the mid­dle of the night with no one around to help you.

I need to find some way around that … I just don't know how.