Apr 02 2009
Up
I work in a three story building. Nothing enormous as architecture goes, but enough to have an elevator in it. Often, that elevator prevents a challenge. And I’m not talking about the inordinate number of times it’s been down for repairs.
You see, right next to elevator is a door. That door leads to a set of stairs. The stairs, as they often do, lead up to my floor.
I don’t think about the stairs when I’m in a hurry as somewhere in my 21st century conditioning I equate “automated” with “fast”. But there are times that I think of them, often on rainy days. On rainy days, I can’t go for my lunchtime walk outside. But I’ve got my stairs.
The Stairmaster is a piece of gym equipment that sells for a fair bit of cash and demonstrates what we all pretty much had figured out: climbing stairs is exercise. The machine version of stairs has some advantages over regular stairs (less of a chance of falling, the ability to vary the depth of the step) but one of the best arguments against accquiring one or joining a gym just to use it is that you can get the same experience by just finding a nearby set of non-mechanical stairs and climbing them.
Back to rainy days.
When it rains, somewhere in the whiney-crybaby-I-don’t-wanna* part of my brain I figure I don’t have a means to exercise. But as there is a perfectly reasonable set of stairs in my building, I have to accept that I do have the means and bloody well should get off my butt and use them.
The moral of this tale is that there’s almost always a way to exercise, an environment that you can set yourself to task in even on days when you think you can’t.
And with that, I’m going to go stop talking about exercise and go do it.
*I can’t claim authorship of this adjective phrase. Thank you Ms. Alder.
Learn abput dementia because those with diabetes are more likely to get it