Exercise

Exercise.  I hate it.  It always seems like such a waste of time to me to do some exercise just for the sake of exercising.  I mean, I don't mind getting exercise when I'm doing something productive.  For example, I mow my own lawn rather than using a lawn service, even when the highs are in the triple digits.  Of course, our lawn is so small that it only takes about fifteen or twenty minutes to mow, trim and blow the chaff off.  Still, that's productive exercise as far as I'm concerned.

Even though I don't like exercising for the sake of exercising, I still do it.  My wife and I try to walk at least three times a week.  We prefer walking in a park or somewhere else where there are interesting things to see, but we will walk at the mall or on a treadmill if it's too hot to walk outside.  So why do we do this when we both acknowledge that it's something we hate to do?  The reason is very simple: we've decided that in order to live you have to keep moving.  We've had some pretty good examples of what exercise can do for a person as they age and what happens if you don't get enough exercise as well.

My parents rarely exercised for the sake of health.  My mother was a stay at home mom who did a lot of housework in a two-story house with a basement.  She had to go up and down the basement stairs, carrying a laundry basket full of clothes, probably twelve or fourteen times a week in order to do the laundry.  Then too, she spent at least one day a week cleaning that big house.  She did this right up into her late eighties, although when she was about 80 years old, she told my wife and me that she didn't really do such a great job of cleaning anymore.  We were both amazed that she still cleaned at all, although I guess we shouldn't have been because Mom was the Energizer bunny incarnate. The point I'm trying to get to here is that Mom lived in and worked around that two-story house every day until six months before she died of cancer three days short of her 89th birthday.  My dad, on the other hand, didn't do much to exercise after he retired.  To be sure, he had spent thirty years or so a letter carrier, walking a route with a satchel full of mail over his shoulder for eight hours five days a week.  When he was working age he also mowed his own lawn, at least until we boys were old enough to mow it, and did the rest of the yard work himself.  After he retired he had to have an aortic aneurism repaired and his doctor told him he should exercise every day to keep his heart in shape. He did that for a few months and then pretty much gave it up entirely.  He died of a heart attack at 77.

My wife's parents started out with good intentions.  They both retired in their sixties and for awhile they both walked five or six days a week at the track at a local park.  To begin with they both made a couple of laps around the track.  Then my mother-in-law got to the point where she would walk one lap and then sit in the car and read the paper while my father-in-law walked his second lap.  Later on she walked about a quarter of a lap and then walked back to the car to read while my father-in-law finished his two laps.  Eventually she just sat in the car while he walked. My mother-in-law sort of gave up on housework too.  My father-in-law would make the meals and do the laundry while she read the paper or watched TV.  They lived on their own until she got sick and had to move into a nursing home at 80.  She died there about six years later.  My father-in-law is 91 and even though he has to use a walker to get around, has cancer and is permanently attached to a catheter, he rides an exercise bike for half an hour five days a week.  In fact, he was recently in the hospital for nearly a week to check on the status of his cancer, receiving chemo while he was there, and on the afternoon of the day he came back to the assisted living place where he lives, he rode the bike for half an hour.

OK, I know that some of this could just be good genes, but I see the value of exercise here.  So Ellie and I try to get exercise in at least three times a week, in my case, and five in hers.  We plan to keep moving until the lights are turned out and and we can't move again, hopefully way into the future.