Road Apples by Tim Sanders
April 30, 2012

Accidental exercise

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I love exercise. I love jumping jacks and running and one-handed pushups and treadmills and bicycling, too. Let me qualify that statement: I love watching other people do those things. Just last week I watched a movie with several young ladies in those tight exercise outfits sweating like nobody’s business, exercising their traps and quads and abs and lats and glutes and other body parts with equally exotic names. I don’t believe I’ve ever had any lats or glutes, but I have a sneaking suspicion that if I’d done enough exercising when I was younger, I might have developed me a very impressive glute. Four or five, maybe. But unless you count the late Jack Lalanne, who finally killed himself at age 96 with too much exercise, old men don’t exercise. They just watch. Watching is a very healthy activity if done in moderation, and I felt much better after watching those girls exercise. I actually worked up a sweat.

But a few days later I had an epiphany. I don’t get many epiphanies, so I took note of this one. It came to me while I was attempting to squeeze into a pair of Levis I hadn’t worn in several years. I was having trouble. Someone had obviously found those Levis, removed several feet of denim material from the waist area, and sewn them back together. But they had been very good, serviceable Levis, and I felt they still had a lot of wear left in them. I pulled and sucked in my mid-section and tugged and hopped up and down. I even fell back onto the bed and raised my legs into the air, under the theory that perhaps all of my body fat would rush to my head and leave room in my waist to fasten the waistband. No luck. Finally I exhausted myself and gave it up as a lost cause.

That was when Marilyn told me that if I ever wanted to get into those Levis again, I’d have to start exercising. Which brings us to my epiphany.

My epiphany was that if what I’d been doing for the last fifteen minutes wasn’t exercise, then I was no judge of physical activity. It was very clear, at that moment, with all of the blood that had rushed to my head fertilizing my brain, that EXERCISE DOES NOT HAVE TO BE A POINTLESS ACTIVITY. A whole lot of the things we do every single day consist of exercise, strenuous exercise, for which we get absolutely no credit. It wasn’t that I didn’t exercise, it was that nobody recognized that what I was doing was exercise. I knew right then that if I pulled and hopped and wriggled and kicked my feet in the air and said bad words in order to squeeze into those Levis four or five times a day, within a month I’d have lost enough weight to ... squeeze into those Levis.

This made me think about all the other daily exercises for which we get no credit at all. For example:


• WALKING - Any doctor will tell you that walking is an excellent exercise. You don’t have to run, just walk, they say. I think they call walking “low-impact running,” but I could be wrong. I haven’t done the math yet, but I’m sure I walk fourteen or fifteen miles a day looking for my reading glasses. There are several places where they might be, including the bathroom, the den, the living room, etc. You can never be sure just where you left them, and since you aren’t wearing them, sometimes you can overlook them setting there on the kitchen table, which may cause you to return to the scene of the crime eight or nine times before you spot them. If, by chance, they are flipped up atop your head, you just might spend an hour in hot pursuit before a helpful family member finally stops laughing long enough to point them out.


• SPEED WALKING - As you age, this occurs most often late at night. I received a kidney transplant from my sister several years ago, and most kidney transplant patients are given a diuretic, like Lasix, to make sure they ... go. It is important to exercise that kidney, you know. I exercise mine quite strenuously, sometimes four or five times a night. This exercise consists of mumbling UH OH, leaping from the bed, and speed walking to the bathroom. It also involves bending over to lift the lid, and then again to lower it, followed by the obligatory flush. I think nighttime speed walking and lid lifting should count for something, exercise-wise.


• WASP AVOIDANCE - For reasons known only to them, our deck is often a convention center for flying insects with long stingers and no sense of fair play. For several weeks each spring you will see tiny signs on our street which read “Occupy Pineview Court,” and have arrows pointing toward our house. A single wasp, if he is determined to do so, can get 45 mph out of your average senior citizen, of which I am one. And if sprinting is good exercise, then sprinting while waving your arms in the air for six laps around the yard provides an excellent cardiovascular workout.


• LIKEWISE FOR THE FIRE ANT TWO-STEP.


• KNEESY, EARSY, NOSEY and FINGER WIGGLE - If you don’t know about Kneesy, Earsy, Nosey and Finger Wiggle, then you aren’t a true Laurel and Hardy fan. Stan Laurel was a virtuoso at both Kneesy, Earsy, Nosey and Finger Wiggle. The activities involved strenuous exercise, excellent eye-hand coordination, and lots of spare time. Kneesy, Earsy, Nosey and Finger Wiggle were not just pointless activities, but were pointless activities designed to drive Ollie crazy. It worked. By the way, since Ollie never mastered the routines, he was always overweight and short of breath. Stan, on the other hand, was slim, trim and energetic well into his 70s. I earned a black belt in Finger Wiggle, and a black eye working on Kneesy, Earsy, Nosey while tacking a loose shingle back onto the roof. It’s the kind of exercise a senior citizen should never perform without proper coaching.