I like exercise –if for no other reason than when I’ve finished, it makes me feel like I have expiated some ill-defined atavistic, yet autogenous guilt that I nevertheless like to blame on my mother. I suppose it borders on the masochistic to enjoy feeling that muscle groups everywhere are self-destructing, but there you have it –a modus vivendi. It’s not for everyone, I realize; not all of us require the degree of atonement bred so cleverly into my genes –okay, into my mother’s.
But each time I walk past Brien’s place and see him sitting motionless on his porch staring at his favourite tree, I wonder whether his mother had been a little too lax in her parenting. Too light on the guilt. Of course he’s retired now, as he is so fond of reminding me, and he feels he’s earned his sloth –although he prefers to refer to it as lassitude because he likes the word… I had to look it up.
Anyway, I am always on the alert for shortcuts to fitness for him. I have, in fact, made it into a kind of evangelistic vocation, so it was with no little frisson of excitement that I decided to tell him about an article I’d found in an old edition of the BBC news on the subject: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-37249021 And it’s rather cleverly disguised by what seems to be an encrypted acronym, HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) which is a plus –it would at least get me onto the porch.
“Hey Brien,” I said, waving at him from the sidewalk in front of his house. He always likes a warning salvo before the trespass.
“Hey,” he said, sounding as if I’d just wakened him up. Brien is a man of few words. He claims it’s to conserve energy, but I’ve been trying to encourage him to lengthen his sentences as a kind of warm-up thing.
“I found another article for you to read,” I said, threading my way with care over the cracked and broken concrete slabs that led to the porch. He used to tell me that he thought they discouraged thieves, until I pointed out that those kind of people would probably walk over the lawn to sneak up more quietly.
Even as I approached, I could see him rolling his eyes –his version of a stretch, I suppose. “Exercise again?” he asked with a yawn. He once called me an Exercise Witness, but I think he’d forgotten the right name. Anyway, I don’t hand out pamphlets or visit anybody else in the neighbourhood.
“Just fifteen minutes a week, Brien!” I thought I should italicize it, even though I knew he wasn’t very good at picking up those sorts of subtleties.
His eyes had stopped rolling by the time I reached the porch and were now wandering over my face as if they were hunting for something –the catch, probably.
“As a matter of fact, just 5 minutes at any one time…”
The eyes suddenly jerked upward to fence with mine. “Thought you said 15…”
His eyes were now embedded like fishhooks, so I smiled to disarm him. “Five minutes, at a time, three times a week on different days.” I thought I’d better clarify it for him.
“So that’s three days, you mean?” I nodded. “I have to spread it out…?” I nodded again, although I was beginning to wonder if I’d got it right.
He walked his eyes over to the tree again and hung them there for a while. Suddenly they returned with another question. “If you only need to do 15 minutes in a week, why can’t I get it all over with in one go, so I won’t have to worry about remembering it all the time?” It occurred to me that it might have been the longest sentence I’d ever heard from him.
I thought about his question for a moment. I couldn’t recall anybody in the BBC asking about that. I suppose the idea was that most people don’t have the time to do the 150 minutes of moderate exercise per week that they claim is usually recommended. “Well,” I started, sewing together my argument as I spoke. “It’s actually five bursts of 60 second exercise, each followed by 90 seconds of rest… I imagine it’s kind of tiring…”
“Hah!” he announced with a truly athletic show of eye-rolling. “Knew there’d be a catch.”
I sighed theatrically to indicate my frustration. “But that’s why you get to rest after each exercise!” I think I wasted the exclamation mark -they just seem to bounce off him like commas. “And you get to rest five times!” I wondered whether also adding two italicized words in a row might win him over instead, but I could tell by his confused expression that I’d squandered those as well.
“I’m not arguing about the rests,” he explained, obviously trying to be patient with me. “More about the need…”
I threw my hands up in exasperation. “We have to keep fit when we get older, Brien.”
He rested his eyes on my cheek and left them there until I cooled down. “Fit for…?”
That was unfair. “Fit… So we can…” But I was stuck, and although the smile that crept onto his face gave him away, he waited quietly for me to say something so he could refute it; I decided on ‘health’. “…So we can be healthy.”
His smile grew until it split his face into two halves. “Which means…?”
His use of the ellipsis was beginning to bother me –I hate it when people copy my grammatical stress relievers… “Which means… I don’t know… That maybe that we can continue being able to do what we want.” It was weak, but it was all I could think of with his eyes sitting on me.
“I am…” He was just playing –he knew he had me. He summoned his eyes and sent them off again to roost in the tree. “Isn’t that what retirement is for…?”
Musings on Retirement 