Torturous Tale of a Treadmill

Remember last week when I bought a treadmill at Sports Authority?  One of the main reasons I went there was to get it delivered so I wouldn't have to hassle with getting it up two flights of stairs by myself.

Wednesday.  A terrible and blustery day, high winds, hail and serious squalls.  Late afternoon, I'm reading, dogs are napping, the phone rings.  It's the UPS guy calling to tell me he's on his way but looking at his GPS map, it looks like my road is a dead end.  The question is, can he get out once he's at my house.  I'm sort of puzzled by this.  The UPS truck goes up and down the road day in and day out.

Ha.  Turns out, my treadmill is coming from some place in California and is being delivered in a semi. WTF?  I have a long, convoluted conversation with the dude, but I'm already getting a slightly sick feeling that he won't be able to make it to my door.  I tell him to call when he gets to my road and I'll meet him.

Twenty minutes later, just as he calls, the heavens open with a deluge that would have scared Noah. Incredible thunder, lightning, hail that fell like bullets and lashing winds. Seriously.  I wonder some days about timing and odds and the cruel humor of the gods.

To make a long, bitterly miserable story short:  The guy is truly in a flaming semi-truck and there's no way he can turn around once he enters my mountain road.  We end up taking the treadmill totally out of the box (it wouldn't fit in my car otherwise) and between the two of us huffing and puffing, manage to get this 175-lb machine into the back of the Blazer. He starts to leave.  I ask him to take the cardboard and styro--which is blowing all over the frigging place--but he says he's not allowed to take the refuse.  Then I ask how I'm supposed to get the treadmill out of my car when I get home.  He shrugs, gets in his truck and drives off. Bugger bloody hell.

It's raining harder now, I'm soaked to the skin, hair plastered to my head, running down my face, and I have to hurry home, somehow unload the machine and dash back to load the huge pieces of cardboard and styro before I have to chase it all over the mountain.

I won't go into the nightmare of trying to unload 175-lbs of unwieldy metal and motors. I will gloss over dropping one end on the driveway with a loud and ominous clunk as the weight and the rain rip the thing out of my grasp.  I drag it into the garage then dash back to collect the debris, which of course won't fit in the Blazer without being cut into pieces with the box cutter.

Now the hail is about the size of marbles, blowing in drifts like the precursor of nuclear winter, and I'm halfway hoping to be struck by lightning and put out of my misery.

I leave the damn treadmill in the garage and call it a day.  I need time to figure out how to get it up two flights of stairs when I can barely move the weight an inch.

Thursday was really busy with errands and appointments, but whilst driving all over town, still pondering the how do I get the machine upstairs issue, I remember I have those furniture slider disks.  I end up having to move the treadmill on its side, using my leg to balance it, because it won't go through the door into the laundry room straight on. Holding 175-lbs with your thigh gives new meaning to high-impact aerobics.




I call it a day with the machine propped against the wall in the laundry room.  Day Two over and I still have the worst part ahead of me: the stairs...

Yesterday, after a supreme struggle, possibly a tear or two, and definitely many, many curse words, I managed to get the damned machine to the first landing. It took me nearly an hour of sweat and angst. I have discovered muscles I never knew I had and never want to know about in the future. There was a moment whilst pulling 175-lbs up the last step to the landing when I thought all my female parts were going to fall out, then as I dropped to the floor, I wondered if maybe an alien was going to pop through my abdomen instead.  Clearly, I am out of shape.

I sat there groaning for several minutes, then called it a day and crawled up the steps.

Last night I tried to think of someone, anyone, I could call to help me with those last ten steps, but of the folks I know along the ridge, most are elderly...as in 70s and 80s.  I woke up in the night and went through various scenarios for getting that blasted machine to the main floor.  I thought maybe end-over-end might get the job done faster, quicker, though the margin for being crushed and/or crippled was greater than trying to pull it.

Virtually bench pressing 175-lbs.  Wow, who knew what agony that could be?  Still. End-over-end worked and I got the treadmill up the stairs in about ten minutes.  Then I sprawled across the machine like Desdemona and kept gasping, "I did it, I did it, I did it."

Course, I wasted another hour because I wanted the machine in my bedroom, but after dragging it there, it's too big for the space where I expected it to go.  Crap. Haul it back to the main room, move the dogs' toy box and beds and here's where the thing has to be. All things considered, this is as good a place as any.  And frankly, at this point, I don't care.

It's been an exhausting, difficult week.  I'm still very cranky with UPS.  I'm glad I didn't kill myself or have any of my internal bits become external.  Once again, I am woman, hear me....well....okay, at the moment hear me whimper, but whatever.

And with all the pushing and pulling and yanking and dragging over the past few days, I've lost two pounds already without even turning on the machine.  Cool...