Friday, October 2, 2009

A friend of mine recently had the desire to whip himself into shape at age 32.

Being the mindless drone follower that I am, I decided to tag along, seeing as I could use a good whipping into shape as well.

The workout consists mostly of running on the old Seven Mile Bridge, then running up and down the stairs next to the Seven Mile Bridge. It isn't all that creative and unfortunately cannot be packaged and shipped to willing buyers for $19.99 by the ghost of Billy Mays, but it seems to be working.

[Sidenote; "The Ghost of Billy Mays" would be an awesome name for a band.]

Its pretty simple actually. We essentially run on the bridge until we feel like we are experiencing heatstroke, then we stagger back to my car. Since there is no shade on the bridge and it is apparently not even strong enough to support the weight of fishermen anymore, every workout is like an adventure. I don't mind, since I need some sort of adventure in order to keep my interest. That and an MP3 player full of Phil Collins music. I guess others need a similar style of motivation.

Every year during football season, we are treated to a series of feature stories on football training camps and the devices coaches use to get their players in shape. On Sunday I saw such a piece on San Francisco 49ers head Coach Mike Singletary. He used, wait for it ... a hill as his preseason camp's main training device.

That's right, just 40 feet of piled up dirt covered in grass.

The story featured interviews with several of the players talking about what a great physical and emotional training device the hill was. I know the idea of hills may seem foreign to longtime Keys residents, but really? Professional athletes have spent their entire lives working out in just about every conceivable way. But throw a hill at them and apparently all hell breaks loose.

In a society that now has escalators and elevators whisking up to even the most meager height, I guess the idea of running up and down a hill had grown outlandish.

The point, I think, is that professional athletes get paid millions of dollars to stay in shape. I, on the other hand, get paid dozens of dollars to sit in an office and write stories about a sewer system.

So if I'm going to stick to this plan, I am eventually going to need to do something even crazier to keep the program going. Many moons, and pounds, ago I played lacrosse in college. In order to keep my meager scholarship, I had to stick with the program all four years.

There isn't much adventure training to be had in the Keys, unless you like wrestling sharks I guess. Maybe if they took the side rails off the bridge it would give me more of a rush.

Since I am no longer a young college kid, I also actually have to watch what I eat. Right now I've been eating those stupid "veggie delight" sandwiches from Subway. The whole sandwich's name is a misnomer though. The vegetables pretty much consist of lettuce, cucumbers and peppers, and the "delight" is nowhere to be found. It's a bread and water sandwich that is sometimes spicy if you bite into a pepper that hasn't been sitting in those plastic trays for over a month.

Bottom line, when you exercise and diet, you are not only training your body but also your sense of self control. As modern-day humans, we are conditioned to wallow around this mortal coil until we die as a natural behavior. I love nothing better than to turn into a mouch (half man/half couch) on weekends. Hopefully I can break that trend, and if you are heading home from work and see me near death on the bridge, throw me a honk of the horn. I'll assume it's for me, and not because the guy driving the car ahead of you is leaning out of the window to take a picture.