I think I’ve been had by Willis Wright, a feeling that I probably share with many better than me.
We encountered each other after greeting family members during the visitation for a deceased mutual friend. The renowned and now retired high school football coach mentioned that he read my recent column about an encounter with an elliptical exercise device.
I had written about how the thing had arrived in a box and had required the assembling together of over 150 pieces, most of them small items of hardware that would all fit into the palms of my hands. I had also written that when successfully assembled with only one tiny part left over, I felt that I had demonstrated a mental dexterity that my wife no longer considers me capable of. I think that I called and told her so.
Coach Wright told me that he had also ordered such a contraption and that when it had arrived, he got all those pieces out, took one look at them and then packed them back and returned the elliptical to wherever it had come from. And he told me this as though he was in awe of my assembly “accomplishment.”
And right then I knew he had me. When I had unpacked all those pieces I had briefly considered trying to send it all back. The reason I didn’t was because as difficult as it looked like assembling the thing would be, putting them all back into the box appeared to be impossible — like I had opened Pandora’s Box.
But the Coach had found his way onto an elliptical anyway, he told me, and found it a satisfactory exercise without placing undue stress on the knees — which had been my purpose in ordering the thing — and other joints.
Then he got me again.
He said that he had found that he could — do you ride an elliptical if it’s going nowhere? — exercise on the thing for 30 minutes but after that it was good to stop, rest and maybe go for 15 minute “rides” with appropriate rest between.
And when he told me this I never let on that the first time I had mounted the elliptical only a few days before I was exhausted after three minutes. When I had dismounted my legs had felt like rubber and prone to bend in directions not intended.
Soon after my encounter with the coach, I was struggling up to five minutes, then six, this morning a few more, but all the while thinking, “30 minutes! Wow! How does he do it?”
At some point during my thinking since that encounter, I wondered if I had accidentally stumbled into one of Wright’s legendary coaching secrets. How many of those wins during his distinguished career had he won simply by getting inside his opponents’ heads before either team ever took to the field?