A Pilgrim’s Digression

For what it’s worth, I went jogging yesterday for the first time in my life. I don’t even know whether to mention it, because I am not sure I can make running into a habit.

I hate exercise for its own sake. Exercise has to be one of the silliest ideas mankind has ever come up with as a means of occupying his time. Think about this for a moment: would a Neanderthal man purposefully run five miles a day, simply for the sake of running? No, he’s too busy worrying about where his next meal is coming from and defending himself and his family against predators. True, he took his exercise from those necessary activities, and his diet was meager so he probably did not ever have a weight problem. It is also true that a Neanderthal had no concept of cardiovascular health; but my point is that exercise is a concept that could not exist in a culture or society other than one in which the (literally) bread and butter problem of famine does not exist.

Only wealthy, well-fed, content societies have time or resources for exercise.

But one doesn’t even have to go back as far as the stone age to find a time in which the idea of exercise for its own sake would have been regarded as ridiculous. Byron may have swum the Hellespont, but he did not do so for the exercise. Indeed from what I’ve read, by the time he died at age 36, he was actually rather portly, though no less attractive to women of the day. From medieval times, fat was regarded as a sign of wealth and good health, and thus was a rather attractive quality in a potential mate.

However, I am making excuses for my sloth. I am nearly as old as Byron when he died, with neither his good looks, magnetic personality, wealth, or poetic achievement. And I have been a veritable slug for most of my adult life.

When I go to the doctor, she always tells me, “Well, your weight is holding steady at least,” which I always took to be a compliment, but which in fact was probably a criticism. I need to lose a few pounds.

It isn’t just about the weight, though. As I said, I am soon to be 35 years old, and my body is not going to get any stronger or healthier with my lazy ways. A comedian once pointed out that 39 is really the cutoff for human growth and development; after that point, it’s all downhill, a continual battle against decay, disease, and death. He may have postponed a little too far the age at which the decline begins, perhaps to give himself a little leeway.

I’ve felt for some time that if I didn’t start taking a little better care of myself soon, it might soon be too late. I may end up one of those early heart attack patients who can’t bench press 65 pounds without angina, and who have to walk the treadmill on its lowest setting at the local rehabilitation center.

One fact I always keep in front of me is that my grandpa died in 1975 at the age of 49. His death was from complications due to smoking, specifically emphysema and heart disease, but presumably the risk of heart disease was in his genetic makeup and would have afflicted him sooner or later, even without cigarettes.

So yesterday I decided to start running.

I hooked the dog up to her harness and leash, and we went for a jog around the block. The first half-block was uphill, and I had to stop and walk when I got to the top. I turned right onto the next street and walked to the end of the block, then jogged downhill to the end of the next block. By that point, my lungs were really burning and I was gasping. I walked to the next block, then forced myself to jog the rest of the way home.

The dog wasn’t even panting, in fact she was pulling against her harness as best she could to make me run faster.

I did that run twice yesterday, once at noon and again around two. The second time just about killed me. When I got back to the house, I couldn’t stop coughing. Each intake of air stimulated a bout of hacking that brought gobs of phelgm into my throat from somewhere deep in my lungs. I don’t know if the deep gasping for breath I was doing while running acted as an expectorant to fluid that had built up in the bottom of my lungs, or if I was expelling gunk left over from my brief experimentation with tobacco years ago.

Whatever the case, though I tried to lie down and take a quick nap, every breath brought on a coughing jag and sent me to the bathroom to spit into the sink.

I must be in really bad shape.

I am going to try to keep this up as best I can. My wife and I have gym memberships, but she is the only one of us with any kind of dedication to using it. I hate exercising in a gym more than I do jogging around the block. I feel self-conscious in a gym, sort of like I did in gym class in school, because I don’t fit in there. I’m the pudgy one in the baggy clothes, the one who actually needs to be there, but who is intimidated by all the fit people who simply by their presence emphasize my sluggishness.

Another comedian once said, “I have a body that could stop an orgy.” Oh, how true, in my case.

So, maybe I can start taking care of myself by jogging around the block…in the middle of the afternoon, when everyone is at work, and I can convince myself that no one will see me. We’ve all seen the person who is overweight out jogging, and we all think to ourselves (don’t we?), “Hey fatty, take another lap or two. It’ll be good for you.”

Or maybe I am the only one who thinks those kinds of things. I grew up in a family that was extremely prejudiced against fat people. My grandpa, who had a sometimes mean-spirited wit about him, would comment on fat people he’d see at restaurants and out in public.

Some of my own feelings of self-loathing are therefore probably family-generated.

Yet I do need to start exercising more. My job is sedentary, my hobby (video games) is sedentary, my lifestyle is overwhelmingly sedentary. The most exercise I get occurs in the summer, when I mow the grass on an irregular schedule of sometimes once a week, sometimes once every two weeks.

My plan is not to specifically focus on weight loss, because I don’t know that I will actually lose any weight, since I am not really changing my eating habits. My goal is simply to build greater cardiovascular health. I’m looking at it as sort of a quest or mission, such as in my video game, World of Warcraft. This week, I couldn’t run all the way around the block without suffering extreme pain from lack of oxygen. If I keep it up, maybe one day I can make it around the block, and then I can set another goal for myself.

Since I am not at home every day during the week, during the time I am in Washington I have to use a different regimen to boost my stamina.

I’ve settled on the stairs as an acceptable alternative. I began by walking three flights today, twice up and twice down. In my building, three flights of stairs is about 114 steps. Walking from the second floor to my office on the fifth floor thus provides a similar cardio burn as jogging the half a block from my house to the top of the hill/end of the block. I am basing that strictly on the feeling in my lungs and heart, the way my skin prickles and feels clammy, etc., when I reach the top of the steps or the end of my first run of 100 yards or so.

That’s pretty sad, when you think about it. We used to run the 100 yard dash in gym class. I don’t remember it exhausting me all that much, and in fact short foot races were one of the few activities I was actually pretty good at.

Oh well. It’s just a sign not just of how my body has changed, but how it isn’t getting any better; in fact it is going in quite the opposite direction. There is no reversing the decay, but if I can get serious about exercise for the first time in my life, maybe I can delay the decline by a decade or so.

Still, I can’t help but feel that the Victorians had it right, or even our near ancestors in the forties and fifties. I remember being amazed to learn that athletes like Mickey Mantle and Joe Dimaggio actually smoked cigarettes. There was a fundamentally different attitude towards health and exercise in those days. Not to say that they had it right, since prior to the health craze of the seventies and eighties people tended to die from the abuse and neglect of their physical bodies.

However, there may also be something wrong with the almost obsessive tending of the body for its own sake, or out of a neurotic and equally unhealthy image of physical beauty. People who engage in physical exercise for hours out of the day, for no other reason than to fill some hole in their psyche that other unhealthy people fill with food or alcohol or drugs, seem to me to be missing something fundamental about life. What good is health without enjoyment and relaxation?