Exercise

I’m in for it!

My job consists of sitting. The only exercise I get is from my fingers picking at various keys none of which are more than two inches from each other (exercise idea: keyboards with more than two inches between the keys). That and walking. And oh yes, eating.

To read the literature, this sedentariness is killing me faster than if my wife were to start spiking my coffee with small doses of carpet cleaner. As a new father, this won’t do, of course. But there’s the rub: the only time I can possibly hit the gym and stop the company which owns said gym from royally helping me rip myself off, I’d need to get underway by 5am. Which means a 4.45am wake up. Which means a 9pm sleep time if I’m going to be of any use the next day, which means ad nauseam.

I trust you see my ‘quadrilemma.’ So, it’s die slow faster, or die fast slower, or die fast faster, or die slow slower. Or something. And while I’m figuring all this out, there’s food—as in consuming less, but better. It seems you can’t out-exercise a bad diet. Curses! So there’s that as well.

Strangely, in High School, I was a jock of sorts. I ran the 100m sprint (badly), the 400m (badly), threw Shot Put (badly), the Javelin (badly) and played Soccer (NOT badly). Arriving on American shores, not unlike Cortes, seems to have been a bad move for your humble correspondent (for the arteries in my case, and for the Indians, in Cortes’) because I immediately started sitting—for school, for church, for watching sports—instead of playing—for, well just about everything. America is the Seating Capital of the World. We sit better than any Goddamned People in the Universe, a boast I can make unless they discover The Milky Sit.

The other question I must answer before it’s too late (ie. I die, in case you’d forgotten what this was all about) is what kind of exercise I should half-kill myself doing. I hate being a human being because [a] nothing is easy, and [b] everything is a paradox. So, to get better, I have to work at self-inflicting pain and now I’m trying to decide exactly what version of pain I should be enduring so I can take even more pain in the future.

I’ve read (which I do a lot of) that getting the heart and other stalwarts of the cardio-vascular system to work better is indeed better. So it’s cardio. But I don’t like cardio and I’ve read (some more) that lifting weights, in addition to building muscle which helps “burn” fat—even though the only burning taking place is the cozy campfire in your lungs—also is “cardio-protective.” I’d rather something that was “death-protective,” but surely I ask for too much, aye, what?

I think what I’ll do is to start a cardio program for the next four weeks then switch to moving masses of iron inches first this way then that. My only regret is I should have decided this before the onset of Old Man Winter because absolutely nothing sucks (sorry Professor Mondo) more than walking from the car to the gym wearing gym clothes at 5am on February mornings in Boise, Global Warming Climate Change notwithstanding.

Wish me luck.