I ran ten miles Sunday, struggling to keep the last three miles under nine minute per mile pace, finishing in just under 1:33 and feeling pretty good compared to last week. What can I say? I've got a long way to go.

Monday, I played basketball for about the same amount of time and managed to injure myself four separate times: a blow to the temple as the result of an opponent's attempt to block one of my acrobatic layups; a cut and bruise on my right thigh from falling on it while trying to execute a spin move to the basket that was probably beyond my capacity for balance while in motion; a cut on my right calf of undetermined origin; and a bruise on my right quad from the knee of a man half a foot taller and fifty pounds heavier whom I abruptly stopped in front of on a fast break. The last prevented me from running for the following two days.

Tonight I ran on the treadmill. It was an awful seven miles with the iPod on shuffle and despute over a thousand songs at my disposal, I couldn't find one I wanted to run to. Once I've listened to a song a couple of times while running, it is somehow exausted for me for that purpose. This leaves me with a bunch of twittery acoustic girl folk which is better suited to hanging out and burning incense in a college dorm room than summoning the will to run in place while staring at a cinder block basement wall for an hour and fifteen minutes. So I end up skipping through dozens of songs before finding one that doesn't immediately remind me of previous unpleasant treadmill runs. Then I play about one minute of that song and skip through several dozen more before searching by artist and playing something by the Killers or some other band with an inflated sense of fist-pumping YEAH! underdog comback spirit, and even that stuff gets old pretty quickly.

I should have an adrenaline pump the way some people have insulin pumps. Before I get on the treadmill I could give it a squeeze and then air drum my way through five miles. Then I would also get an upper-body workout as well.

I ran five times this week, which is a good week given my current pathetic state of unfitness.

Last Sunday's "long" run was an eight mile death march which was the consequence of running only twice the week before, one of those days being a hilly five-miler on Saturday which sapped what little strength my considerably-sized thighs had in them.

I knew from the second mile that it was going to be a bad run, one of those runs where it seems like you can't run slowly enough to get into a comfortable rhythm, but I told myself (as I always tell myself) that I've been through death marches before and that I just needed to suck it up and keep putting one foot in front of the other until it was over.

This time there was a competing, reasonable-sounding voice telling me that perhaps I should just turn around and go home since it was warm, I had clearly lost some fitness by sitting on my butt all week and I was probably going to ruin the first part of the next week by forcing it on that day. Sometimes this is the voice of laziness. Last Sunday it was the voice of reason. I, of course, did not heed it since, for some reason, if I've told myself my long run will be of a certain distance on a given Sunday, then by-god that's what it will be (within a mile or two) lack of fitness and sore quads be damned.

I was strong-armed (or weak-legged) into a compromise of eight miles; my original plan had been to run ten. I paid for my stupidity with dead legs as I plodded through the next couple of days, but I promised myself not to go into next Sunday trying to run more miles on that day than I had in the preceding six days.

Wii gave in.

So my wife bought me a Nintendo Wii as a surprise the other day. I'm sure that the mention of said game system will up the number of hits this blog receives.

Initially, I thought that as far as video game systems go, the Wii could potentially have a positive effect on the overall health of people who would otherwise remain seated while wasting their hours playing video games. While it's true that I occasionally break a sweat while boxing armless competitors, male and female -- Wii don't discriminate -- I believe the cardiovascular benefits are offset by the damage that I am apparently doing to muscles and joints I was heretofore unaware of.

By the end of the night the day I got it, I had a constant pain in my left shoulder which increased when I breathed in. I assumed I had either dislocated my shoulder "playing" baseball, or I was having a heart attack. The following day I woke up with pain in the opposite shoulder which did diminish as the day went on. However, that evening I began to get numbness in my fingertips from trying to "throw" the baseball too hard. I "boxed" for about an hour, nearly elevating my Mii (which bears an uncanny physical resemblance to myself) to pro status by beating a variety of opponents whose bodies resemble large spheres fixed atop a collection of elongated cylinders and which appear to have been designed by a fourth grader. This morning I woke up feeling like a butcher had been quietly trying to separate my lats from my ribcage all night.

It's a sign of the times that you can actually get physically injured while playing video games. I should stick to real exercise. It's safer.