The Importance of Exercise

                                                                             
Recently I heard that walking is done less by people in the United States than any other country in the world. In fact, the report stated that less that 13% of Americans walk on a regular basis. I didn't hear the whole report, just this little bit of information, but I'm sure it didn't include the walking we do to and from our cars or to the refrigerator to get a bowl of ice cream. I wonder if walking up and down an escalator counts?

I think probably most writers or office workers don't get enough exercise, and I'm probably one of them since writing is a sedentary job. Even much of our social interaction is done sitting at a computer or on a phone. And the times we meet family and friends in person; usually it's to go to lunch or dinner, or maybe to a movie, concert or the theater. More sitting.

I'll admit I've never liked the bend and stretch and other boring types of exercises. Years ago I'd sometimes exercise with some TV guru. It never lasted. I had a cheap treadmill once, but found that monotonous, too. When I had a stationary bike in my laundry room, I'd peddle away on that for a half hour every day watching Jeopardy on a small TV over my sewing machine. But that was years ago in another house and another time. I have no room for exercise equipment in this house, and going to a gym doesn't appeal. The closest one is almost ten miles away and rather expensive, and I neither want to spend the time nor the money going there.

However, the one exercise I do enjoy is walking. Every morning I go for a walk in my woods that lasts a half hour or more, and if I go beyond my woods, it's much longer. The only time I skip my morning walk is if I need to be somewhere else early, or it's raining hard, or the snow is too deep, or the temperature is in the teens with a wind chill factor much lower. I use two walking sticks. They're old broom handles, nothing fancy about them. The walking sticks serve several purposes. First, they help me stay upright when I trip over roots hidden under leaves. Second, I can swoop them in front of me those times of the year when spiders or little green worms booby trap the trails with their webs. This lessens having webs decorating my face and hair. Third, the sticks help propel me along and work to bolster my upper body strength. It's not that I need them for propulsion, but I'm always forgetting to use the little hand held barbells in the house to build muscles in my arms. Every little bit helps, in my opinion.

All the years of camping with my family; husband, kids, parents and younger siblings, always included a lot of hiking. We'd take at least one trail in the morning and usually another one later in the day. To this day, all my siblings like to walk, as does my youngest daughter, Mary. When I go to California to visit her, she always plans hikes for every day, often in a redwood forest. When my siblings and I get together for camping trips every year, hikes are a definite part of the activities. My youngest brother is even a marathon runner - an extreme form of walking, I'd say. He'd probably be horrified that I'm relating what he does to walking, but marathon runners do slow to walking at times during a race.

Other exercises of mine are carrying buckets of water to ponies and chickens, cleaning stalls several times a week and sometimes shoveling snow in the winter. But my exercise level really increases in the spring and summer. Then it's spading the vegetable bed (I never can get my little tiller started), planting, weeding and mowing (not with a riding mower, either) and so many other yard and garden chores. All this cuts in on my writing time, but I consider it helping me to live longer. So in the long run, I'll have more years to write. Did I mention before that I'm an optimist?

What do you do for exercise? Do you think you get enough exercise?