“Are you physically fit?” bellowed the man on the television screen as he jabbed a muscular finger in my direction.
“I don’t know,” I exclaimed, a bit startled by the suddenness of the question.
“Are you physically fit?” he persisted. This
man was loud, muscle bound, and so deeply tanned that where ever he
was, he must have been near the surface of the sun.
“You’re getting older,” he continued.
I am getting older, I thought, nearly every day.
“Do you even know what it means to be physically fit?”
I had to admit that I really didn’t.
“Of course you don’t know what it means, you’re a tiny pathetic weed of a man.”
I still didn’t know what it meant, was a little insulted, but wished that someone would tell me.
“Well I’m going to tell you.” He seemed to
be reading my mind. “Physical fitness is the ability of the body to
function with vigor and alertness, and with ample energy to engage in
leisure activities. Endurance and cardio respiratory integrity are the
overt signs of physical fitness.
Well this was absolutely no help at all.
My body functions with vigor and alertness,
in as much as I seldom fall asleep when I don’t want to. I have
endurance; I can run over one-hundred feet before the searing pain in my
side renders my unconscious. As far as cardio respiratory integrity
goes, my heart’s been beating for my entire life and hasn’t stopped yet,
how much more integrity do you need?
Ample energy for leisure activities? Any
activity that requires an amount of energy that can be characterized as
ample, isn’t leisurely at all.
Here are a few activities that I don’t
consider leisurely: running, jogging, speed
walking, walking normally over long distances, walking slowly up an
incline, lifting heavy objects, carrying heavy objects, lifting then
subsequently carrying heavy objects, rock climbing. Rocks should never
be climbed, if you’re trying to get somewhere and there is a rock in the
way, go around it or blow it up. Why do think Alfred Nobel invented
dynamite? They didn’t name that award after him because he wasted his
time scrabbling up and down rocks.
It was at this point that the man on the
screen began doing squat-thrusts. There has never been a time in the
history of mankind that it was necessary to do a squat-thrust.
I decided to change the channel. Eventually I
found a man reclined in a hammock, sipping a drink through a straw as
waves washed a sun soaked beach in the background.
Now that’s a leisurely activity; one for which I have ample energy.
