I’ve always kind of sucked at moderation. I am either absolute and a little obsessive about things or I just can’t be bothered at all. There have been times with my running where my training consisted of simply going out and running as many miles as my legs could carry me on a Saturday and then not bothering for the rest of the week.
My whole body was aching when I woke up this morning, but I decided a few weeks ago that I was going to get out and jog/run every single day, regardless of fatigue or injury, if only for a mile or two. Sometimes people say to me that “Oh you shouldn’t exercise every day, three times a week is enough” which I always find a bit of a nonsensical statement, but I have given up saying so. If you get out of bed every morning you are exercising every day. You don’t simply stay in bed four out of seven days because “you should only exercise three times per week”. Further, wild animals don’t go out hunting for food three days a week because they read as much in some magazine. If they only exercised three days per week both they and any little babies they might have would most likely starve to death. At this point in the chat, people who impart the three-days-per-week wisdom will tell me that you should only exercise intensely three days a week, at which point I inform them that, at my age, intense exercise is something I only do once a week and only if I feel like it. “But you’re running every day,” is an answer I’ve received many times, to which I invariably reply: “No, I’m plodding along at a very slow and easy pace and my heart rate when doing so is likely less than yours is when you’re sitting there on the couch eating biscuits”. The point, which I’ve tried to impart a gazillion times, is that you can, in fact, exercise every day and everyone who gets out of bed does so, but how much effort one makes when exercising determines whether you burn yourself out or not. I’m not sure why I continue to engage in this conversation, sometimes with the same people on multiple occasions, and yet I do. If “insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results” then perhaps I am insane. As I footnote, I must note that this phrase has apparently been wrongly attributed to Einstein and there is no record anywhere of him having said any such thing. The true origin of it is apparently a feminist author by the name of Rita Mae Brown.
My dog, Lucy, died in June 2021, at the age of 16. For most of her life she needed at least two walks a day or she would go a little bit crazy. There was one occasion, when she was young, that I didn’t walk her properly for two or three days and she went completely and utterly batshit. She chewed my wallet to bits, chewed a hole in my favourite shirt and ate several of my CDS. My own fault entirely. She was an energetic dog and without a run every single day she would have so much pent-up energy that she would be on the brink of exploding with devastating effects, like a nuclear bomb. From walking her every day for 15 years (she was 10 months old when I took her from the pound) I learned that moderate amounts of exercise every single day can pay dividends long term. She came to my mind this morning when I was trying to make excuses not to go for a jog. It didn’t matter if I was tired, hungover, sick, if the weather was dire, or anything else; the 15 years I had Lucy, I had to get out and walk every single day, and no matter what, I always felt a little bit happier for it even though, oftentimes, every fibre of my being often did not want to go outside at all.
And so, this morning I went out for a one-mile easy jog to perk myself up a little bit. After about half a mile, I felt a slight pull in my hamstring, but after another it had eased off and I started to feel like an engine that was warmed up and ready to drive for miles. I’ve always had this idiosyncrasy where, once I start down a certain path, I find it hard, almost impossible, to stop. My biggest problem these days is guzzling stupid amounts of coffee. I love the giddy mischievous feeling it infuses my nervous system with. I’m not sure if everyone is as sensitive to coffee as I am, but I get a real buzz out of the stuff and often like to keep that buzz going all day long, which inevitably leads to my talking a bit excessively and feeling quite tired and drained by the time it’s time to go to bed. Some people complain about coffee keeping them awake at night, but I am actually the opposite. When I get caught up in coffee binges, I actually find myself feeling more tired generally and actually end up sleeping a lot more.
As I come to the end of my one-mile morning run, I feel primed, and part of me wants to keep going and going until I can’t run a single step more. But this is not the path of salvation, this is the path of excess and the path of excess leads to destruction. I’m feeling quite dopey and slow witted as I quit drinking coffee a few days ago and bargain with myself that I can stop running and grab a coffee from the machine in the shop. “Just the one” to percolate myself a little bit. One is no harm, one is medicinal. Everything is ok in moderation. I go up to the counter and the lady, seeing me in my running gear, asks, “Jeez, do you ever stop running?” and I answer, “I’m just trying to be my best self”. I pay for my coffee and after a couple of sips can feel the caffeine goodness dispelling the clouds of dullness in my brain. “Maybe I can get a hang of this ‘moderation’ thing yet,” I think.