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The July Project: Day 3
The first time I got serious about exercise, I became a member of the YMCA in downtown Knoxville, Tennessee. The Y offered an incentive program for runners. They gave out 6 x 9 index cards on which you could record your miles by inking in a grid of 500 tiny boxes. When you filled the card, you turned it in with $5 and got a downtown ymca 500‑mile club T‑shirt.
I filled up two cards, so I also got a 1,000‑mile club T‑shirt before I left Knoxville. I worked hard for those cheap T‑shirts. Even though the card program relied on the honor system, I scrupulously discounted fractional miles and pushed myself harder every time I neared the end of another row of boxes.
Fast-forward to the summer of 2004 …[MORE]
The July Project: Day 2
I see T‑shirts with slogans like “Softball is life,†“Rugby is life,†“Shark-diving is life,†and so on. I used to find them stupid and arrogant. What the heck is that even supposed to mean: softball is life? Obviously, there’s a lot more to life than softball.
 Gotta have it? Go ahead and click. I won’t tell.
Then I found my own exercise passion: walking. It didn’t turn into an obsession overnight, and I never felt compelled to rush out and buy a walking is life T‑shirt. But I got hooked on it.
And over the course of several years, I discovered the wisdom of the T‑shirts …[MORE]
The July Project: Day 1
I like to take on a new self-improvement project or two every month. I pick some part of my life that needs work, and then I try to give it time and attention every day. This week, as the first half of 2010 came to an end, I got the idea of collecting my favorite ideas about diet and exercise—a draft owner’s manual for my body, a reference I can turn to when I’m struggling to lose one more pound. Maybe someone else would like to read it, too.
I’ve lost about a hundred pounds in the last six or seven years. When people ask me how I’ve done it, I don’t like to give them the simple formula …[MORE]
Note: This post is a sequel to Update: Walking Wherever—Within Reason.
 The first hurdle in the way of my Friday walk was Dallas rush-hour traffic. Less than 24 hours into my trip, and I’d already lost track of what day it was, so I was surprised to find a few million other people on the road when I set out for White Rock Lake. The second impediment was having lost any understanding of Dallas freeways that I’d ever possessed, so I failed to find the spur that appeared to cut across from I-35E to northbound I-45 on the Google map. Then, although southbound I-45 was clearly marked, I drove for miles without finding any signs pointing toward the northbound direction. It’s been my experience that the northbound and southbound parts of an interstate highway usually connect somewhere …[MORE]
Note: This post is a sequel to Walking Every Day, Wherever I Find My Feet.
 On my way to Dallas yesterday, I ran into a traffic delay in Spring and another one near Centerville, where I-45 was reduced to one lane for about five miles. It took more than half an hour to crawl through the construction zone. So I didn’t get into town until about 8 p.m., only to discover that in the two months since I made my reservation, I’d somehow confused my hotel (the Marriott Suites Market Center) with another one nearby (the Marriott Residence Inn Market Center). That mistake added another half hour to my already-too-long journey.
Nevertheless, as soon as I finished checking in, I dressed in walking attire and headed up the freeway to Bachman Lake …[MORE]
One of the challenges of committing to everyday exercise is figuring out what to do when you’re traveling. Fortunately, my favorite workout—walking—is the most portable form of exercise you can get. You can find somewhere to walk if you go anywhere with solid ground. (I’m told that cruise ships usually have walking tracks, too. Boooooring.)
I enjoy scoping out walking routes when I’m preparing to visit an unfamiliar city—or a familiar city from my pre-exercise‑fanatic days. When I went to Los Angeles for a conference last winter, I identified Griffith Park as a possible walking site. I met a friendly native at the conference who drove up there with me and showed me where to park and where the trail starts. I took wonderful walks there in the afternoons. On one side, I had a view of the pale purple San Gabriel Mountains …[MORE]
Last weekend I told some friends about the work of Aubrey de Grey, gerontologist and chief science officer of the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) Foundation. Dr. de Grey speculates that we’re eventually going to cure the causes of aging and that some day humans will live to be a thousand years old. That notion always gets me thinking about a question I find intriguing: How would you live your life differently if you knew you had another thousand years to live?
Let me put it another way: How would you treat your body if you knew it had to last another thousand years? Would you quit smoking? Would you be more careful about what you eat? …[MORE]
In some of her workshops, my friend and sometime coach Mattison Grey has offered a theory that everyone is about either fame, money, or winning, and that making this distinction can help you figure out how to help people get what they want.
I don’t know whether that idea holds water for everybody. I can’t speak for people who are about money or fame, and it seems to me that there might be all kinds of other things to be about—love, pleasure, or security, for instance. But as Mattison explained it to me, since my orientation is toward winning, the way for me to reach any goal I’ve set is to turn it into a game I can win …[MORE]
 You can get there from here.
Do something every day. That’s the mantra of my exercise program. I repeat this to people all the time: “If I’m sick, or if I’ve worked an 18‑hour day, or if it’s raining, I put on my shoes and I walk around the block.†Something. Every day. It’s how I satisfy the terms of an imaginary contract that my brain has made with my body.
Today, I found myself without a car. My 10‑year‑old Maxima broke down last night, and this morning, a friend helped me jump‑start it and dump it at the mechanic’s shop. I’ll find out tomorrow what’s wrong and when I can have it back.
Meanwhile, I had to get some exercise. …[MORE]
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