Sports, Sports, Sports!

My wife and I both want to be physically fit (i.e., athletic). Neither of us equate thinness with fitness. (I clearly learned the difference in seventh grade when it nearly killed my skinny little body to finish a 5K fun run in 38 minutes.) With that in mind, I cannot understand why we did not become more active while we were losing weight in 2003. We certainly had more energy. But our exercise consisted almost exclusively of riding the indoor recumbent bike.

We did not ride the bike because we thought it was a fun sport. Rather, it was simply a means to an end. We did it because it burned calories, period. It’s no wonder we quit doing it when the results didn’t readily show up on the scale.

It is clear to me now that, even though our goal was to become physically fit (i.e., athletic), our focus was entirely on becoming thin. Of course when you are 50 or 60 pounds overfat, losing fat is a big part of becoming fit. But it is certainly not the only part. Yet it is the only part we focused on.

It is different this time around. This time our focus is not entirely on losing fat. We are beginning to get active in a number of different sports, each with goals independent of fat loss. Naturally, participating in these sports will help us lose our fat (and keep it off!), but that is not what we focus on as we participate in these activities.

So what sports are we talking about? To begin with: golf, tennis, bicycling, and running. I plan to add karate in the near future, but haven’t yet committed to it. We also plan to add other physical activities such as hiking and backpacking. Right now the primary focus is on running, as will be explained next time.