Jimmy's Fitness Page

Sensible Fitness Training

In this website you'll find information on many different approaches
to fitness and physical training. Neither of us are world class
athletes and we've both had experience with ill health as well as
good health, and with being out of shape as well as being in
shape. Alice still has belly muscles that feel like a slab of
hardwood -- from fanatical situp training -- and although I don't
think of myself as unusual I notice that a lot of people I went to
grade school with are either incapacitated or dead. Many of them
were athletes who could kick my behind in high school. I'm still
doing the things I could only aspire to when I was a teenager.
Other people might think I'm a fanatic about fitness and good
health. I have been at times, but I think I've grown out of that.

To me fitness training is essential, but it's also a long cycle of ups
and downs. Exercising isn't what I want to do with my life. The
other things I do depend upon being fit and well, because I'm not a
sedentary person. Exercise is part of my life because it has to be
– without it the quality of my life suffers. But, if there was any way to
get around having to do the usually boring and repetitive work of
fitness training – if there was a magic pill I could swallow that
would keep me strong -- I'd take it. Working out is usually boring
and uncomfortable if not actually painful.

If I'm on a long backpacking trip, I don't take time out for yoga or
calisthenics. I'm doing enough already. At times in my life when
I've had physically demanding jobs I haven't cared much about
fitness training, because what I did was plenty. I'd take the
weekends off and go fishing. I try to look for balance in my
routines, doing more training when I'm doing less in my ordinary
life.

I'm not an extremist but for fun I've always enjoyed doing things
that are tough – setting myself personal challenges rather than
competing in races, and then losing interest in training when I've
met the level I set as a goal. For me, a big part of the fitness
challenge is staying interested. I'm not interested in treadmill
running, although I co-own one with Alice and we do use it. I'm not
interested in a lot of the training machines and tools that we have,
but I use them. I trick myself into doing things by telling myself,
well, I haven't done that for awhile – then I work out in earnest with
the dusty toy until I approach the old level of confidence I
remember, and I lose interest again.

I think that's a common way of maintaining good health, not to
push fanatically like an Olympic athlete but to push occasionally, to
reach reasonable goals and stay somewhere in that zone. With
the right approach I have time for other things, including doing
nothing. Last week I sat around and did hardly anything, worked at
my writing and felt like my time was well spent. This evening I went
for a good run, three and a half miles at a pleasant pace, and I'm
feeling like doing physical things again.

No program works unless you want to do it, so this website is
about a lot of things that help keep you going when you lose sight
of the goal. Be extreme if you want, but there's a Middle Path
that's much more comfortable.

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That would be me.

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