LIVE TO BE A HUNDRED...EXERCISE!!

Everything I read about folks who are prone to heart problems keeps harping on and on and on about exercise. Well, there’s nothing to exercising. Just hop out there and walk a couple of miles and it’s done. I hopped out there. I nearly died walking a couple of miles. Surely there was something a little more tailored to my fat cells.

I moaned and groaned. I said unkind words about the gene pool I’ve been swimming in since birth. My daughter finally got tired of the tirade and gave me her fitness machine. It’s supposed to give a person a total cardio-vascular workout with low impact. My fat cells liked the idea of low impact. They thought it meant something easy.

The little machine didn’t look so formidable. Somewhat like a bicycle with a big handle bar. Couldn’t be all that difficult to master.

The machine sat there for several days before I realized that I had to use it before it would help me. I’d hoped that just owning it and having it out for all the world to see might be enough. But it wasn’t.

I got on it for a trial run, grabbed the front bars, put my feet on the pedals and pushed and pulled just like I was supposed to. Well, that was easy enough. Actually there was nothing to it. I could easily fall in instant love with low impact exercising if that’s all there was to it. I could exercise right beside the air conditioner vent once a day and my heart would last forever.

On Monday morning ... all programs having to do with diet or exericing must begin on Monday morning or they never work ... I put on some good music and began my twenty minutes of cardio-vascular low impact working out. After two minutes my heart was beating fast enough to tell me that I sure didn’t want to attempt anything with a high impact. At the three minute mark my shins began to complain. The old heart and shin bones could fuss until they put up a snow cone stand in Hades. I was determined to stay with it.

At six minutes all the moisture had been low-impacted out of my body. My mouth felt like it had been swabbed out with cotton. If I would have had to spit to get into the Pearly Gates I would have been in big trouble. At ten minutes I decided half a workout of low impact was good enough to start with. I drank a gallon of water before I was able to answer Husband’s questions about the machinery.

“It’s a piece of cake,” I said. “Low impact. Nothing to it. You try it.”

Evidently he didn’t believe me. He hasn’t grabbed those bars like a long lost brother and started to give his heart a total cardio work out yet.

Through the weeks I’ve discovered just how much I hate that machine, sitting there in all it’s self-righteous, mocking glory. I’m up to twenty minutes but my knees still feel like jelly when I’m finished. I’ve found out, too, that I have to exercise early in the morning or my brain will figure out what I’m doing and find a dozen other more pleasant things to do. Like cleaning the toilet or washing down woodwork or going to the dentist.

I read an article last week about exercising. It stated that for every mile you run, or twenty minutes that you do a low-impact cardiovascular glider you add one minute to your life. Not much compensation for worrying about whether or not I’ll have enough spit in my mouth to answer the questions to get me through the Pearly Gates or not. But then when I added up the minutes, it was kind of impressive how many years I could extend my life by just twenty minutes of fighting with the machine every day.

By faithful exercise I could live to be 100 years old. That means that I can spend an additional five to six years in a nursing home at the rate of $5000 dollars per month. Yep, they can haul my low impact machine to the nursing home and set it up in my room. By then I will have a close friendship with the thing. I may not know my children or my grandchildren but I’ll demand twenty minutes on my machine every day. When I die they can bury me with a water bottle ... just in case.