As a child, I exercised in fits and spurts. A chubby girl, I was clumsy when I played sports. Pursuits of the mind took precedence over those of the body; often my nose was buried in a book.
Running is a great start to the day, but sometimes I feel overwhelmed and struggle with motivation. Most mornings, an energizing run gets me ready for the day. On not-so-good days, I start tired, and it takes more coffee than usual to get myself going.
As a cardiologist, I always try to emphasize the American Heart Association’s recommendation to exercise for 30 minutes every day. Unfortunately, during the COVID-19 pandemic, my regular exercise facility was closed. But I found it easy to tell myself that I got plenty of exercise walking around the hospital, using the stairs, and going back and forth to the office.
I retired from critical care nursing in the wake of the COVID pandemic. I had been an avid runner prior to my retirement, and I was then able to start a rigorous exercise program as well. While I had been thin prior to retiring, my new regimen became an obsession, as I focused on exercising, running, and eating “right.”
My daughter and I enjoyed taking cycling/spinning classes together while she was in high school. We attended classes most weekends. As her graduation approached, she announced, “I’m going to get certified as a spin instructor and teach at college.” Then she added, “I think you should get certified to teach spin, too.”
So I did.
I used to work at a facility that had a very well-equipped on-site gym for employees. I would meet a co-worker there just about every day and we’d exercise together. One day, while walking past the receptionist’s desk, gym bag in hand on the way to my daily workout, the receptionist remarked, “You are so disciplined!” I smiled and continued on to the gym and my scheduled workout.
At the beginning of the pandemic, our hospital’s new gym, which had barely opened, shut down due to the strict COVID-control measures. The YMCA pool where I swam each week also closed. And my personal training sessions became virtual, conducted from a makeshift workout space in my basement.
My natural inclination is to live a sedentary life—sitting on the rocking chair with a good book or lying on the couch for a two-hour nap. Even when I caved in to social pressure from friends and joined a gym, I limited my workouts to thirty minutes on an elliptical with little elevation and at low speed.
Dear Pulse readers,
I often encourage my patients to get some exercise. And I offer the same advice to myself. In fact, just this morning I planned to go out for a run.
And then I didn’t.
I enjoy working with adolescents and young adults who are in treatment for addiction because, despite their vulnerability, they are at an age where interventions have a reasonably high chance of being successful. Their genetic risk for addiction is something they cannot change, but they can modify their overall risk by changing their environment and carefully choosing their friends.
It was his first visit to a hospital–any hospital–since his birth in this one eighty years earlier, and the trip to the emergency department for blood in the urine soon escalated into a workup for bladder cancer. He became one of the most memorable patients of my medical school experience and, for that matter, my entire career.
Though so crotchety that some of the staff avoided him whenever possible, he and I always got along well.
I grew up on a farm in Connecticut, went to college in Rhode Island, and have lived my entire adult life in small-town Vermont, so the mores of rural New England are deeply engrained in me.
That means Robert Frost’s poetry is part of my vernacular. (I own two hardcover copies of You Come Too, a collection of his most popular poems: one copy was printed the year I turned ten and bears my name on the flyleaf in childish script;
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