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Archive for the ‘exercise’ Category

The shared interests of couples

Posted in Bruce Byfield, exercise, friendship, Personal, relationships, Uncategorized on April 15, 2007| 3 Comments »

You can’t know what somebody else’s relationship is like. Lately, though, I am starting to believe you can tell the state of a relationship by how the couple share – or don’t share — interests.

A few months ago, I read an ex-friend’s comment that, when he and his wife went to the cinema, they didn’t always go to the same movie. Admittedly, they worked together, but this comment horrified me. Why get married if you don’t want to spend time with the other person? Because you’re in love with the idea of marriage, rather than a particular person? After such an admission, I wasn’t surprised to hear from another source that this couple had come close to divorce at least once.

An equally unhealthy interaction is common among the weight-lifters in the exercise room half a mile from our townhouse. Every once in a while one of the younger male weight-lifters will bring a girl friend with him. Inevitably, the young woman will do a couple of slow minutes on the treadmill, pedal the cycling machine half-heartedly while reading People, and pull unenthusiastically on a few weights while the young man struts with the other weight-lifters.

Except for one, who has taken up serious training, none of the young women return. However, a couple of the men have brought other women a week or two later. My guess is that the women wouldn’t have come once, except that they felt they should try to share their lovers’ interests. But they did so as a duty, making no effort to get into the spirit of what they were doing. Having one person feeling martyred and the other feeling humored isn’t exactly the best recipe for a relationship, so I’m not surprised at the apparent failure of these relationships, either.

In contrast to these two situations, I interviewed a free software advocate in a local pub a couple of weeks ago. When he sat down, he immediately pulled out a complicated-looking piece of knitting involving three needles and a couple of balls of wool. He explained that he and his wife had made a pact that they would at least try each other’s interests. His wife had learned enough to install FreeBSD for herself, and he had learned enough knitting to design a couple of patterns, and soon hoped to do more.

“How does that work out?” I asked.

“Pretty well,” he said shyly. “We’ve been married fifteen years so far.”

Well, no wonder, I thought. Admittedly, his wife might never learn to enjoy installing a computer operating system, and he might never learn to love knitting. But at the very least, they could both learn something about the other’s passions –and that has to be good for any relationship.

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The secret world of the early morning jogger

Posted in Bruce Byfield, exercise, Personal, running, Uncategorized on April 9, 2007| 2 Comments »

When people ask why I run first thing in the morning, I like to say, “So nothing worse can happen to me the rest of the day.” The reply usually gets a smile, but really it’s an effort to avoid a more complicated explanation. Unlike many people, my circadian rhythms are not set to any particular time of day; I adjust easily to functioning whenever I need to. But explaining my pleasure at the hidden world of early morning takes time, especially since my reaction is probably colored by the adrenalin and endorphins pumping through my system.

I admit that in the winter months, when my morning run begins and ends in the dark and often takes place in the rain, I sometimes mutter self-dramatically about “the courage of the early morning,” borrowing the title of the biography of Billy Bishop, the World War One flying ace. For me, the title expresses perfectly the dogged sense of duty with which I drag myself out the door. Yet those days are relatively few, and even that feeling of being active when most people would choose to stay in their beds can feel perversely individualistic.

For most of the year, though, the early morning is a special time regardless of the weather. The relative coolness of the morning is stimulating from the spring to early fall. In the late fall, it stirs the leaves at my feet until I could be running in the middle of a legion of ghosts. In winter, the briskness raises the hairs on my arms, and adds the mild danger of black ice that I have to tiptoe across. And for a few weeks each spring and fall, I can time my runs so I’m at the top of a hill just in time for sunrise.

We live close to the green belt around Burnaby Mountain, and often I share my morning run with the wildlife. Over the years, I’ve seen skunks, eagles, crows mobbing a raven, and who knows what else. Once, I heard what was probably a cougar in a bush nearby (I took good care not to confirm my suspicions, and hastily revised my route). Several times a week, I see coyotes loping along on their business, doing an almost perfect mimicry of domestic dogs. Once, I even saw a coyote sitting waiting at a light – although I’m sure it was watching the traffic flow, not the change of signal. Drivers are on the road by the time I start running, but, half-asleep and sealed in their cars, I doubt they see even the animals who are near the roads – let alone on the trails I sometimes take. At times, I could almost be the only human in an alternate universe.

At other times, it’s the people I notice, stumbling through their morning routines, surrounded by an invisible sphere of privacy, stumbling to the bus stop, or blearily scraping ice off their wind shields. By the coffee shops, I see people staggering in like zombies for their morning fix and emerging with their smiles of relief as they take their first tentative sips. In the light industrial area I sometimes run through, a cloud of pot smoke often lingers here and there, proof (if any was needed) how minimum wage warehouse clerks survive their day. At the Skytrain station, tech-workers march grimly single-file along the side of the road on their way to work.

On weekends, I also see the remnants of the previous night: the road-kill red and raw, the pairs of shoes tied together and flung across a telephone wire, and the smashed bottles of beer at the side of the road. On Sunday mornings, when I’m not sleeping in myself, I see the shift workers and the survivors of one-night stands coming home. Once, I saw a woman in a pink bathrobe and curlers, coffee cup in hand, headed singlemindedly for the nearest coffee shop, careless of the fact that she was on the main commercial street of the neighborhood.

Other times, the appeal of the early morning is the isolation of feeling that nobody else is alive, much less stirring, and I’m the initiate of some private lore denied to everyone else. These days come when the streets are so empty of cars that I could run safely down the middle of the road, and not a light is to be seen in the apartments and houses that I pass. The best day of the year for this feeling is New Years’ Day, when everyone is still sleeping, and these feelings are enhanced by the rosy glow of Puritanical virtue.

For much of last year, I couldn’t run because of reoccurring knee injuries, and I found myself growing restless about mid-morning. Part of the problem was lack of exercise, but an even greater part was the chance to start the day with the time for private reflection that a morning run provides. When I re-started my morning runs about three weeks ago, my main reaction was a sense of relief – as though I had restored pattern and meaning to my daily routine.

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Exercise room cultures

Posted in Bruce Byfield, exercise, Personal, Uncategorized on March 25, 2007| 1 Comment »

In the past few weeks, my increasingly creaky knees have forced me to replace much of my running with an exercise bike. Since our townhouse doesn’t have room for a bike, the change means jogging over to the recreation center about half a mile away. More importantly, it means that exercise, which for years been solitary and meditative for me is now a public activity, a fact emphasized by all the mirrors placed on the wall in an effort to disguise how crowded and dingy the exercise room actually is. I’m not comfortable with the change yet, but it has allowed me to observe the two main approaches to exercise.

No matter what time of day I go to the exercise room, most of its inhabitants are one of two kinds of people: bodybuilders and aerobic trainers. The bodybuilders are mostly teenage boys or men in their early twenties, with a scattering of middle-aged men. The aerobic trainers include women of any age and middle-aged and elderly men — more or less everyone else.

The bodybuilders know that the exercise room is meant for them, and the number of weight machines compared to the bicycles and treadmills reinforces the idea. They hang around in the aisle, so you have to be arrogant to push through them, and they don’t put their weights away. Worst, few of them ever wipe the equipment after using it — a habit that makes everyone else grimace in disgust.

The bodybuilders aren’t in the room to exercise, although occasionally some will do a few reps with too many weights for a sensible program. They’re there to talk sports, and to make sure everyone is aware of exactly what weights they are working with by talking as loudly as possible about their progress. When they actually start lifting, they sound like a class of actors warming up with basic emoting, grunting and yelling as if they are in pain. If using loose weights, they are apt to let them clatter to the floor — ignoring the signs requesting that they don’t — with grimaces and exclamations of pain (some of which turn real, as the weights bounce on to their feet).

The reps finished, the bodybuilders turn to their real purposes. For a few, especially the older ones, that purpose is striking a brooding pose on the bench, often with loose weights on the floor, looking like each of them is imagining himself to be Conan the Barbarian in melancholy contemplation of his sword and the mayhem it is about to cause. This mayhem inevitably involves a half dozen reps on another weight machine before they strike their favorite poses again.

However, for most of them, the real purpose is preening in front of the mirror. If you’re a woman and you don’t think that some men enjoy seeing themselves in a mirror, then the bodybuilders will be a revelation to you. Making muscles, strutting up and down with rolledup sleeves while coyly glancing sideways at their reflections, they look more like adolescent girls who have just discovered their sexuality more than the macho strongmen they seem to be imagining. Occasionally, one or two will compare muscles, a process that inevitably turns into a wrestling match in which the goal is for one bodybuilder to get the other in a headlock.

By now, you should have guessed that I am using the word “bodybuilder” facetiously. Once or twice, true bodybuilders have stopped by, and they have all the quiet dedication of any other athlete.

But what I enjoy about the usual run of so-called bodybuilders, with their self-assurance and all their lordly ignoring of everyone else, is the fact that they never notice that it’s the aerobic exercisers who, stepping around the bodybuilders — in women’s case with a hint of nervousness — who are doing the serious exercise. They do long, hard slogs on the treadmills and stair climbers or low weight, high rep routines on the weight machines. Many of them cool off with calisthenics afterwards. They’re in the room long after the bodybuilders have clustered around the TV mounted near the ceiling that always seemed tuned to a hockey game, or gone home. And, unlike the bodybuilders, by the time they’re finished, they need their towels to wipe themselves down afterwards. Yet I doubt that the bodybuilders have ever noticed that the people whom they dismiss have a better claim to being hardbodies then they do.

I still miss the quiet contemplation of solo exercise. But I’m thinking the amusement value of comparing the toughness of a tiny Asian woman going about her exercise routine to the slackness of the steroid-addled bodybuilders who get in her way might almost compensate.

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