My husband is an alien

Ouc ouch ow ow ow.

OK, that’s probably not the best way to start off after that title. Don’t worry, it’s not what you’re thinking. What it is is a bad case of DOMS – delayed onset muscle soreness, from exercise. I did this innocent-looking Crossfit workout yesterday (yeah, it’s Monday’s, but they had a rest day yesterday and I had one Monday after the weekend’s rowing) and it most thorough kicked my ass, or rather my quads, abs, upper traps and pecs. Rudder was pretty sore from his weight-lifting Monday (often the second day is the worst) and we agreed by mutual consensus to sleep in and skip this morning’s workout (not, unfortunately, until the alarm had gone off – I much prefer deciding the night before, so we don’t get woken up and have to try to go back to sleep).

We both decided that we should do our workouts this evening, after work – in my case, a light session on the erg, in hopes it would get rid of some of the soreness. His comment was, “Well, at least it doesn’t hurt for long on the erg.” I gave him The Look – in my experience there are days when you take a thousand strokes and it hurts just as bad on every fucking stroke. I said, “What planet do you come from again?”

He continued, “Well, you know, it’s like when you row a hundred kilometers- ”

I interrupted, “Maybe you should change the pronoun there.”

He continued, “When you row a hundred kilometers-”

I corrected, “When YOU row a hundred kilometers. Most of us don’t do things that insane.

He went on, “OK, when I rowed a hundred kilometers, my hands only hurt for a while in the beginning.” (Note: not true, even for him – apparently it hurt worst in the middle. But he was playing for effect, by this time.) “It’s always like that – once you get going you forget that it hurts.”

I said, “Maybe it’s a good thing we didn’t try to have kids. I don’t think we’re genetically compatible. I’m human, but I’m not sure what you are. Some kind of genetically engineered super race? An alien?”

I’ve decided I’m going with the alien theory. His ancestors came over on the Mayflower and in the next hundred years or so. If they’d been a lot later – especially the German strain – I’d be wondering. After all, just because the Nazi scientists were evil it doesn’t follow that their creatins would be. Especially creations who didn’t know what they were. I can picture them:

“Ja, ve vill create a master race! Zey vill look like humans, but ze vill not be human! Zey vill be able to row ein hundred kilometers, und zey will able to ginore pain, ja…”

Or maybe they secretly migrated from fictional source, like Robert Heinlein’s Friday. Maybe I married a ‘brother’ of Marjorie Friday Baldwin’s – OK, I know his father wasn’t a test tube, nor his mother a knife, but you go a few generations back and who knows?

It’s probably just simpler to assume I married an alien, though.

(Note: the abve conversation including the Nazi part was posted with Rudder’s permission – in fact, it was his idea.)