Weighted vest review

Not really that interested in hyperlinking anymore

I’ve been in agony for the last eighteen months, and something that’s been helping since it’s gotten cold out is walking alone slowly up a mountain in a weighted vest. It’s a difficult trek, but it’s not like I’m summiting some rugged metaphor out there. From the top of the trail system, if I look one way, I see Ballerina Farm, and if I look the other, I see the new lifts at Deer Valley.

I listen to swooning guys from the 1970s or a pop psychology audiobook co-written by a hostage negotiator. As far as I can tell, if one finds themself “held hostage,” his suggestion is to just keep asking the jailer “Why?” and “How?” until the guy with the gun gets so annoyed that he’s like please, leave.

I didn’t know about weighted vests until a doctor who I pay to try and get to the bottom of that feeling up-top with me mentioned the benefits of wearing one. She learned about it from her buddy, another doctor. The buddy-doctor actually advised to her get one that looks like a chic, sportif puffer vest and wear it all day while seeing clients, which made us laugh.

I bought the cheapest 16-pound weighted vest late summer as my last-ever Amazon purchase. Sydney Sweeney had done one thing or another that pissed me off again, and I took it out on her best friend spacebride Lauren Sanchez. A week after I deleted my account, the Subscribe and Save biodegradable towels I use to dry my face arrived. A few days after that, the every-six-weeks Nutrafol. Oh my god, I will never escape these people.

Now that I know what a weighted vest looks like, I see women wearing them everywhere I go. They’ve been hiding in plain sight this whole time, and I didn’t notice until I opted in to their training regimen. I worry we’ve all been subtly coerced into buying weighted vests by social influencers working closely with the War Department. It’s embarrassing that I’ve become ensared in such a scheme, so I hide my weighted vest under an enormous denim pullover.

I lost track of what my body looks like a few years ago and haven’t really been able to get it back. In lieu of a grasp on all that, I’ve decided that my body should always be at a level of lung fitness where I can climb a mountain and ski down one in case the Midway crater explodes and we need to escape to Cheyenne, or worse. For the first time since college, I own a car, and I keep it stocked like a mobile command station. I got High Chews and canned air in there. More hypochlorous acid than salmonella would be willing to fight. I have an e-bike now, too, and I made sure to get a Captain’s Chair on the back.

I used to climb great mountains with Mars but ever since he got a skater boyfriend, the dog prefers galloping great distances around eight-month-old cul-de-sacs while the human on wheels behind him wields that leash like a tow rope off the back of a ski boat.

On my heavy, solo, vertical walks, which can sometimes get boring, I write a new book in my head about a couple boring into a shuttered mountainside mine and discovering a cavernous parlor carved from silver. This book in my head used to be called My Prospects, but lately I’ve been calling it Our Prospects as we hurtle toward opening a business together. Writing a new book in my brain is a coping mechanism because my publisher is no longer allowing me to touch the manuscript for The Responsible Party, which comes out in August.

Because I used my own name as the narrator’s in the real novel, the manuscript just went through legal vetting simultaneous to its copy edit. For a minute there, I was emailing back and forth with lawyers about the veracity of a killer anecdote I included about showing up to school with a picked pimple in 7th grade.

My work ended last week, but the rest might still feel hard. As I plod upwardly, I try to locate whatever is making me cry that day and turn it into plot fodder for my pretend new book. Lately, I’m crying because a burger place is moving in next door, and the drive-thru exit goes right past our bedroom and living room windows. In March, we moved into a small brick house behind the commercial building that had been a commercial kitchen for many years before we decided to live in it. You’ve never seen so many refrigerators in your life, and all of them were left with chicken salad inside.

We’re still not open, but it’ll happen soon, and I’m not worried about foot traffic. It seems like everyone in the world is finding out about my secret valley home now, and the landscape is disappearing. If I’m this protective, this white, and this new, I wonder how the mythical Timpanogos Ute princess, whose coffin pose profile is carved into the ridgeline over town, must feel. She’s been here 15,000 years.

Unfortunately, last week, I learned that bit of authentic oral history I’ve been repeating to visitors to my home as I point toward the mountain was actually invented by a BYU professor giving a cave tour in the 1940s. We went on an early morning lantern tour of that same cave on my 34th birthday, and our ranger, who looked absolutely adorable in a centennial-honoring National Park Services outfit, apologized to the tour group for all the holes the uniformed stewards of the land had dynamited into the cave over the course of the last 100 years. Obviously, we would do things differently now.