As of yesterday, my Planet Fitness app told me that I have worked out 81 times since I rejoined in April. I have followed in my gym rat father’s footsteps by lifting, cycling, pedaling, rowing and walking on an almost daily basis. The heart attack I experienced in 2014 occurred in the car on the way home after a ‘normal’ workout. On the outside, all seemed well but on the inside, my heart had a fully occluded artery that was lying in wait to take me out of the game. Although I made the ridiculous decision not to call 911 and drove myself to the hospital, I made it in the nick of time to overcome the odds. After a few months of cardiac rehab, I was taken ‘off the tether,’ as I called it and had unsupervised workouts, I returned to ‘the Judgement Free Zone,’ where I remained until the pandemic. As someone with both cardiac and respiratory conditions (COPD), I was conscious of the potential risk of breathing heavily in a room filled with other heavily breathing people. Once I had COVID, and was boosted, I made the decision to come back once again.
Unlike some people, I don’t dread, resist, procrastinate or otherwise avoid going to the gym. I look forward to it, for many reasons. Strength, flexibility, endurance, stamina, weight loss, muscle building, stress management and even meditation. Hard to imagine exercise being meditative but I find it to be so. When I want to turn away from the political theater that plays out on the bank of television screens in front of me, I close my eyes and visualize my vibrant good health. I invite myself into an inner healing temple where I seek serenity. I use affirmations. One difference that I notice between former rounds of exercise and recent rounds, is that it feels like less of a struggle. It is a reflection of how I am choosing to see my life these days.
I am approaching 65 (October 13th) and am looking forward to crossing that threshold that was hard to imagine when I was living through earlier decades. 65 felt so old. I’m not sure why, since my parents were youthful and active until their health declined in their early 80s. When they retired at 65 and moved from New Jersey to Florida, they continued to work and workout. My mother taught water aerobics and senior stretch classes and my dad helped manage a gym at their Town Center. He worked out daily and both of them splashed about in the pool in their condo development. My dad sometimes rode his bicycle the mile or so to work. When I would visit them, I would join him at the gym and her in classes. I was, by many decades, the youngest person there. I was determined not to let these elders outdo me.
Once, I met a 90-something year old woman who was a regular in my mother’s Stretching with Selma class, who walked to the Town Center in the Florida heat and humidity. My mother always offered to pick her up and drive her home, but she adamantly declined, saying that was part of her workout. I wonder how many more years she lived. My father’s doctor told him in the throes of Parkinson’s that eventually took his life in 2008, that what helped to keep him functioning as well as he did, was his fitness regimen. This is a man who had six pack abs in his 70s.
Even though I sometimes struggle to breathe when walking outside, I breathe easy in the gym. The decor of Planet Fitness includes industrial strength ceiling fans that circulate air and seem to help me circulate mine. Regardless of the time of year or weather out the window, I find the gym to be a haven. I remember watching snow falling as I sweated it out. I come in there to warm up in the frigid temps and chill out when it is scorchingly hot.
I joined a Facebook support group for those who workout at Planet Fitness and see their photos as together, we celebrate each other’s successes and cheer each other on. I take a regular accountability photo for myself, as a way of proving to myself that I can take my fitness to another level.
Winnie the Pooh got it right:
“A bear, however hard he tries, grows tubby without exercise.” ― Winnie-the-Pooh
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Photo credit: Unsplash
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Inset photo courtesy of author.