Travel sucks.
I get up at 0400h Thursday morning to catch an 0630h flight out of Milwaukee, on three hours' sleep. Four cups of coffee later, I'm in Minneapolis — and my next flight's four hours away. I got a decent meal at the airport's TGI Friday's, but four hours is a long time to sit on one's ass in a crappy airport seat, between a screeching brood of toddlers and a guy with a pinstriped suit and a Bluetooth headset who's certain that he's a high-powered, wheelin' and dealin' executive business shark.
That said, there's something going on in MSP these days. Most people were your standard north american travellers — slouching, out of breath, dragging wheeled carry-ons behind them along motorized walkways. In other words, the kind of people who make me want to hit the gym.
But I also saw a lot of people who stood out from the crowd. Energetic, vigorous people, with heads high and shoulders squared. Women with powerful legs and honest-to-Sagan glutes, not just bags of flab drooping from brittle hips. Men whose sixteen-inch arms didn't come from eating breakfast at Krispy Kreme six days a week. People with solid and crisply defined shoulders, traps, and backs.
I saw fit people.
Thank goodness.
I just had a funny thought: airport security being what it is today, they won’t allow things like nail clippers and butter knives on a plane. What if you’re like Chuck Norris and your body is your weapon? Can they refuse to let you on a plane because you look like you could kick the crap out of everyone else on board? :)
I’m making a definite effort to stay on top of my health these days. I recently weighed myself and I’m at around 165 lbs, which is back to what I used to weigh when I was 20 years old, and down from my peak of 195 lbs about two years ago. I’m now 26.
But it’s not so much that I’m really taking my health seriously or that I’m getting a ton of exercise. The biggest lifestyle change that I made by far was to _stop_ _eating_ _shit_. I used to drink three cans of Coke every day and eat out almost every day as well–including McDonalds twice a week, pizza, burgers, and other such stuff. I tried to burn off the calories by taking up some weight lifting, but it’s just not in me to be active enough to burn off that kind of junk; I work behind a desk and a lot of my hobbies are similarly sedentary. Besides, it’s not just about the calories–it’s more about the fact that junk food is simply not nutritious. I still eat junk food, but I eat a lot less of it now, and that’s made a huge difference.
As for the physical activity stuff, I try to do a bit of light exercise every day: walking, push-ups, situps, and squats are the bases that I try to cover here. The point here is not to break a sweat or really stay “in shape” but rather just to provide a base level of activity so that no matter how busy I get my health doesn’t degrade past a certain point. For the real “okay, time to get some exercise done” stuff, I try to do stuff that involves my whole body–basketball, squash, and skiing are sports that I enjoy, and although I can’t make time for them every week, getting out to do them for a while most weeks makes all of the difference.
I’m not an athletic guy, and I just can’t get my head into “being fit” or really getting high off of body-building to much of a degree at all. But what I have recognized is that if I just sit and enjoy my couch-potatoe type hobbies while letting my body waste away, I am going to end up a pathetic old man with a bad back and weak legs. Barring any crippling accidents, I want to be able to walk when I’m 60. Besides, being a little more physically active helps me to feel better and keep a more clear head in the here and now. It helps me with my day-to-day life, which helps with my career, my relationship with my soon-to-be wife, and my personal hobbies. Some preventative maintenance now will help a lot to ward off serious problems that could strip me of the use of my body in the future, and knowing that, I just couldn’t keep living the way that I was living a few years ago.
But I can almost imagine what it would be like to wake up one day and realise that I’d let myself balloon to 250 lbs.
Airport security’s even more bizarre than that. I doubt you’d have a problem carrying, say, a cane through a security checkpoint, whether you need it or not. The September 11th hijackers took over four aircraft with box cutters, not fighting knives or submachine guns. It’s perfectly plausible that half a dozen motivated people could take over another airliner with equally innocuous tools — if the passengers on that airliner were scared enough to cooperate.
As for “being fit”: it’s not about being athletic, or being lean; it’s about being able to cope with everyday life and minor emergencies and not run out of energy until you get a chance to rest. Can you run a block to catch a bus, or walk a bag across an airport, and still be functional when you get there? Then as far as I’m concerned, you’re reasonably fit.