I spent a few desperate minutes this week trying to sit atop a big inflated red ball only slightly smaller than a MINI Cooper and seemingly with about the same rate of acceleration. Each time I tried to balance myself so I could proceed to the exercises one is supposed to execute while teetering on this plastic version of a greased pig, the ball would shoot out from under me and make a beeline for the nearest old lady available for upending.
While acknowledging my need for a full exercise regimen at this stage of my life and health, I admit that I’m not the most consistent devotee. When I discovered that I had both diabetes and a heart problem some years back, I immediately got serious and lost 50 pounds. I’ve mainly kept that off; but with serious medical conditions, every pound is important — and, as we all know, weight can shoot up on you unexpectedly in the time it takes to down a Krispy Kreme and an order of fries.
Have you noticed yet that it gets much harder to lose a few pounds with every few years you add? When in our 30s and 40s, Barb and I were able to drop five pounds almost overnight just by giving up the remote control and walking to the TV one evening, or cutting out green beans for three nights. But once we hit what I optimistically call our middle years, those extra pounds became determined to stay where they were, and devil take the hindmost. (And, believe me, the hindmost became the heart of the problem very quickly.)
So this week I accompanied a friend and fellow heart patient to his gym, just to see what his exercise regimen was like compared with my own, which too often this summer has pretty much been to walk back and forth to the kitchen as often as possible and lift very heavy objects like whole baked turkeys from the fridge to the table. It’s amazing how little that effort seems to accomplish in one’s quests for midlife abs.
The gym I visited this week had entirely too many beautiful people, youthful, no-bellied bodies with little concept of swinging upper-arm fat. I don’t want to stand out in a gym as the old one, the out-of-shape one or the gasping, panting one. Thankfully, I’m not in the market for a new gym anyway, since there is quite a good one within half a block of my home — on my very street, in fact — one enjoyed by a number of people, bless their hearts, with bodies not much better than my own.
Eight years ago, when I was in pretty bad shape, I believe someone upstairs must have said, “How about we have somebody put up a gym half a block down the street from Randy Fitzgerald’s house, and then he won’t have any excuse not to drag his sorry bones out every day, rain or shine, sun or sleet, and get some exercise?”
I appreciated the thought, and so I go, much more regularly than I ever would have believed possible for an aging couch potato. But as is true for so many of the boomers-and-older crowd, weight is a constant battle for me. So I walk the treadmill and lift the weights, and every now and then I even get on an exercise bike or pound the cross trainer. I do what has to be done to stay in this wonderful world as long as I can.
I even tried a yoga class once. I don’t talk about that experience, though, or about what happened the time I tried to stand on and stretch one of those darn elastic blue bands! Let’s just say that as a result of both incidents, there are a lot of old ladies at the gym who get out of the pool with some alarm when I step in.
Randy Fitzgerald teaches modern American literature at Virginia Union University. He was a longtime public relations director at the University of Richmond and columnist for the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Contact him at
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