Things More Painful than Exercise

I’m doing the New York Road Runners Brooklyn Half-Marathon this Saturday. Running 13.1 miles can be pretty painful, but one way to keep motivated is to think of things that would be even MORE painful, so I came up with this list:

• Watching Terminator Salvation
• Buying a ticket to a good movie, like Star Trek, sitting down to watch the title sequence, then seeing the film stop and be replaced with the worst movie of all time, aka Terminator Salvation
• Finding out that at every mile marker of the half-marathon, instead of the theme from Rocky, they play the theme from Dawson’s Creek, where Paula Poundstone sings “I don’t want to wait/ for our lives to be over,” but they replace those lyrics with “I can’t wait to see/ Termi-na-tor Salvation”
• Discovering I’m dating the actress Moon Bloodgood, which sounds amazing, until I find out she sometimes talks
• During the race, getting hit by a car, seeing a bright light, then realizing the bright light is a projector that projects Terminator Salvation directly onto my retinas in a continuous loop for all eternity
• Being diagnosed with synesthesia, a real disorder where certain sensations trigger seemingly unrelated senses — e.g., certain numbers “taste salty” or certain words “sound spiky” — except that in this version, whenever you taste any food whatsoever, you see a clip from Terminator Salvation
• Realizing my life is inconsistent, riddled with plot holes, full of grade-school acting, and crammed with pointless SFX to distract me from the lack of a story
• Getting married, having a beautiful wife, expecting my first child, going to the hospital, then the beautiful baby comes out and it’s a baby who doesn’t think Terminator Salvation was an absolute abomination that even Cheney would agree is torture and should be used in lieu of waterboarding
• Having a critic describe my work as “Terminator Salvation-esque”
• Finding out that I’m the director, McG, and that each second of film I shot for Terminator Salvation cost $30,000 — seriously — and that I just accidentally shot 6,420 seconds too many, aka 107 minutes, the entire running time of Terminator Salvation
• Running the race faster than anyone else, then going on forever because I have a nuclear power cell — that’s right, realizing I am a Terminator in Terminator Salvation
• Discovering, after spending $200 million to make a movie, that the last 3/4 of it made no sense because if Skynet simply wanted to kill John Connor the whole time, it could have done so in a heartbeat while the Terminator was chatting with John, by just crushing his skull or something, thus voiding the whole reason for the movie’s existence
• Being a deckhand in the Discovery Channel reality series Deadliest Catch, and in the middle of a good king crab haul, a sudden squall comes up and you’re thrown overboard from the CorneliaMarie, and now you’re the middle of the Bering Sea in 3.6-degree-Celsius water, shocked and numb, but then wait, it’s a miracle, because the Coast Guard cutter Mellon is approaching and they’re throwing you a life preserver, only it’s not a life preserver, it’s the hemorrhoid pillow used by McG on the set of Terminator Salvation
• You know how sometimes you’re flipping through a stack of papers at work and one slices the webbing between your forefinger and middle finger, and it really stings? That.
• Finishing all 13.1 miles, getting a time I’m proud of, having a nice brunch, heading back into Manhattan, resting, having a great improv show, going out to a couple of parties, calling it a night, going home, showering, brushing my teeth, getting in bed, then waking up the next morning…only to realize it was all a dream and I had simply nodded off during the opening credits of Terminator Salvation
• One of the Terminators wore a kerchief around its head, like some sort of hipster pirate. I’m dead serious. A hipster pirate.
• Stubbing your toe on a chair, except stubbing is more like watching, the toes are your eyes, and the chair is Terminator Salvation

I don’t recommend this movie.