Throughout the eighties, I was a bit of a fitness fanatic. I spent, quite typically, an hour-and-a-half to two-hours a day in the gym, six and sometimes seven days a week. I ran perhaps another twenty miles a week. I thought at one point I might even want to compete in bodybuilding competitions. Not the steroid-enhanced Mr. Olympic competitions but in the more realistic, natural competitions that rewarded symmetry over size and mass.
(A beach in Mexico, age 50.)
I never did compete, but the idea of it (the goal of it) did drive me to an exceptional level of fitness, for which, I believe, I’m still reaping the healthful rewards.
When I began writing seriously in the mid-nineties, the additional requirements of it soon took its toll on my workout routines. I was still working a fulltime job and disciplining myself to 25 hours a week of writing time. There simply weren’t enough hours in the day to do it all. And, so, my daily trips to the gym began to suffer.
Something had to be done. I was slowly giving back all the hours and hard effort that I had put into staying fit and healthy.
An early mentor of mine once said, “Our habits either make us or break us.”
Though I’m not a rigid disciplinarian (I know how to have fun too), I do believe this credo is mostly true. So, with that in mind, I set about developing some new habits that would help me stay in shape.
Here are a few:
1. Spare the handicappers. (At malls, restaurants, theatres, meeting places, I park as far from the entrance as possible and walk.) It’s a habit! (And tends to minimize dings in my car doors.)
2. Make haste. (My wife can tell you I walk fast everywhere I go. Makes window shopping difficult and I sometimes have to slow down to accommodate my wife’s shoes, but…) It’s a habit!
3. Don’t just sit there. (Even when I’m relaxing with a cold beer on the patio, I drop down and do twenty push-ups. Then go back to enjoying the beer and the leisure.) It’s a habit!
4. Charge the stairs. (I never meet a set of steps that I don’t run up or run down. I sometimes take them two at a time.) It’s a habit.
5. Flee the scene. (When I do the grocery shopping I run with the cart back to my vehicle. *Which remember is parked in the farthest space from the door.* Okay, this one does seem to elicit stares, as if I’d just robbed the place. But…) It’s a habit!
6. Make life difficult. (It’s common to lighten the load. But, whatever the job, I seek to make the work just a little more difficult. That means instead of two grocery bags at a time, I make it three. Instead of cradling the liter bottles of Coke, I carry them at arms-length… you get the idea. ) It’s a habit.
These are just a few of the many things I do to create worthwhile physical effort. There are a million other ways.
I am a fulltime writer now, no longer having to go off to a job. Which means I can again schedule workouts in the gym. And I do, two to three times a week. But the habits I’ve built stay with me. After the gym, I stop by the grocery, park in the farthest spot from the door, walk to the entrance, and race my cart all the way to the corner of the lot.
What about you? As a writer or as an avid reader, what things do you do to stay in shape?
Darrell James is the author of Nazareth Child: A Del Shannon Novel, forthcoming from Midnight Ink in September. It is currently available for pre-order on Amazon.com
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