Excuses, excuses

July 25th, 2006

I am writing this sitting on an excruciatingly hot train as I am travelling to a meeting in London today.

There have been record temperatures in the UK this month and all you really want to do in this heat is to sit in the garden with a long cold drink, or even to practise your yogic breathing if you are feeling particularly virtuous.

The last thing you want to do is to sit on a train and also the thought of pounding away on a treadmill in a gym seems very off-putting at the moment.

Whenever I feel that I’d rather be doing a thousand other things other than putting in the (static) miles on a treadmill, I think back three years to my encounters with another sort of treadmill - the stress test treadmill in the Cardiology department of the hospital where I worked.

I must have performed hundreds of stress tests on a huge variety of people, all complaining of chest pains and various conditions such as heart attack, angina and breathlessness. I hope never to be on that treadmill myself.
I recall a large number of patients, mostly elderly, but alarmingly some in the forties and fifties, who could not even walk at the slowest speed on the treadmill for three minutes.

Why am I reminiscing about those experiences in the Cardiology department, as I sit on this hot train?

Well, knowing that I would be going out later on today, I decided to do my swim this morning instead of the afternoon as I normally do. If you go to a gym regularly you’ll notice that you meet a completely different set of people to the ones who are there when you normally are.

This morning it seemed that most of the people were elderly, getting their swim out of the way to free up the rest of the day. Although they were swimming slowly and kept getting in my way, I didn’t mind a bit as I recognised that these are not the sort of people who end up being investigated for heart problems.

Like me they had resisted all the other temptations and excuses to do something outside and were committed to improving their health and fitness, even in these temperatures.

Entry Filed under: Healthy Lifestyles