Out of breath and close to death

I told this story at a dinner party last weekend and my friend Lisa P nearly pissed herself. So now that I've put it on a pedestal...

Freshman year at Ithaca College, and I'm really trying to stay fit. Except I'm not, since I have 8:00AM classes and I can eat all the Cap'n Crunch I want. So one Sunday night, I go to bed IN my shorts and hoodie so that when I wake up at 7, I can work out before class.

The alarm wakes me up. I roll out of bed. I step into my shoes and I am out the door in less than 10 seconds. I run down the hall. I run across the parking lot. I run along the large power lines that cut a path up the forested hill. The hill's getting steeper, the snow's getting thicker, and I start to run up on all fours like the training montage in Rocky IV.

A coupe months ago, my wife told me something about how you shouldn't work out, like, half an hour after you wake up because your lungs can put the right amount of oxygen into your blood. Something like that.

Which would have been nice to know on this morning, because as my run up the hill turned into a crawl, the crawl then turned into a belly flop onto the ground. And I passed out.

I woke up an hour and a half later. I missed my philosophy class because I was unconscious, alone, and in a snow bank for 90 minutes.

I gained a lot of weight that year.