Playing to stay in shape

Sunday, May 2, 2010


I was sitting in my front yard watching the kids across the street. Their dad had brought home a kite shaped like an airplane, put it together and shown his daughter and son the basics of flying it. Then he left them to their own devices.

The girl is probably six and her brother is around four. Soon they were joined by four more children in the same age range. The six-year old never let go of the kite and was running around the yard pulling it behind her. She’d never let out more than 5’ of string and so it wasn’t going too high and every time she turned to run with the wind, the kite came crashing to the ground.

Now…what she needed was a little adult coaching. I could have shown her how, if she kept going into the wind and let out a little more string, she could keep the kite flying and not had to run. It was windy and I’m sure we could have gotten it hundreds of feet into the air and then all of the kids could have watched it and…been bored to tears.

Instead…without any help from adults…all six kids were tearing around the yard chasing the kite, laughing, falling, yelling for a turn and generally having a ball. They were playing…and burning up a ton of calories.

I suppose I note this because it’s something I seldom see today, but remember how much I did that at that age. Just went out and played…and never worried about childhood obesity. How could you get fat if you were running for hours, falling, getting dirty, playing make-believe games, and traipsing all over the neighborhood in search of the next adventure? You couldn’t and we didn’t.

Nice story, grandpa…

Okay…they didn’t want me to play so I headed for the Metropark for what I planned to be my new longest run ever. It was in the 80’s and very humid, but I’d run 5 days in a row last week and was feeling invincible. I had a course in mind that should take me further than I’d ever gone before, but if not, I’d tack on the extra minutes at the end.

It took me a while to get started because my Vaseline jar was no longer in the car and there was no way I was trying this run without greasy protection from chafing. I have no clue why it had escaped my car, but I headed home for another jar.

By the time I returned, it was getting late and I’d be pushing up against family dinner time if I ran more than 80 minutes. I started out slowly, as always, and thought I’d just see what the weather would let me do. I hate the humidity and was sweating buckets in no time.

Normally, I can make it about 20 minutes before I need to wring out the sweat band, but now it was happening every 10. If I don’t do this, the sweat just drops on my shoes and then they stink like hell. By the 40-minute mark, my shorts and shirt were completely saturated and the shoes were squishing anyway. I needed a drink pretty badly and finally found a fountain at the 50-minute mark. It helped, but not much.

I was dragging badly now. I’d probably lost 8 pounds of fluid and my hamstrings were starting to cramp. Did I mention it was humid?

I finally reached the car in 73 minutes. I was one minute over my previous long run, but I wasn’t taking another running step. I covered the seat with towels to absorb my wetness and flopped in the car.

I tried all night to re-hydrate…I really needed to get that water back in me for tomorrow’s workout when it occurred to me that Breyer’s Vanilla with Natural Bean Specks in loaded with life-giving water. I read that somewhere, I’m sure, so I went and loaded a bowl and savored every bite. Now…that’s two nights in a row, but no big deal. It will be gone tomorrow and we just won’t buy any for a couple of weeks. Grab the gusto while you can…

Run duration: 73 minutes.

Training Heart Rate: 140.

Calories burned during workout: 1,240.