The short answer:
Not as often as I should.
The long answer:
A lot of people I know have this strange ritual that I don’t really understand. They will pay to go into some building where apparently they do things like run in place or lift and drop heavy objects repeatedly for an hour. They call it “working out.” I’m not exactly sure what it is in them that they feel needs to be worked out of them. Perhaps sweat. Or nonachiness.
I think, then, that it goes without saying that I am probably out of shape. I say “probably” because I’m not exactly sure what being “in shape” means. Does it mean that my actual physical dimensions are those of a healthy person? If so, then my shape is perfectly fine, thank you very much. (As you may recall, I’m sort of lucky, and as such, I have been blessed with a fast metabolism.) But if it means that I am willing or able to exert myself in any sort of physical task, then, no, I can’t really say I’m in shape. What can I say, I’m a lazy bum.
Part of it is that I don’t really see the point of working out. As far as I can tell, the main reason that people exercise is so that they feel slightly less like hell the next time they exercise. I don’t need to exert myself that much in my daily life, so why should I pretend that I do? I suppose people also exercise to lose weight, but if anything I’m light enough that I should be trying to gain weight. Honestly, if I started to exercise, I might lose so much weight that one day I’d disappear. Yeah, that’s a good excuse.
I think I’ve gotten lazier over the years. When I was a kid, I ran around all the time. (I’ll have you know that I was the fastest kid in my second grade class.) But as I grew older and wiser, I must have decided that there really wasn’t any point to running in circles. Also I don’t have to take a mandatory gym class anymore.
That isn’t to say that I just sit around all day. (At least not every day.) But aside from the occasional bicycle ride to work or shoveling of snow, I don’t exercise for a meaningful length of time very much. And since millions of doctors and health experts tell me this is a bad thing, I feel that I should probably believe them. I mean, when was the last time millions of people were wrong? (The short answer: November 2, 2004.)
Recently, my sister obviously must have gone through the same reasoning, because she went out and bought a Wii Fit. I’m unconvinced that she is actually becoming much more fit because of it. But given that, like me, she has quite reasonable physical dimensions, it certainly would appear to the casual observer upon learning that she has a Wii Fit that she must, in fact, be a wee bit fit. And so now that she is at least able to superficially convey that she might very well be in shape, I have started to feel guilty about perhaps not being in shape, if in fact I am not.
That’s why I have started to do push-ups every other day. I admit it isn’t much, but at least I feel like I’m not just a lazy bum, even if I still am. I just wish I had been blessed with shorter arms.
Cheers,
-qm
