Life of fitness doesn’t require modern material commitment

For 20 years – pretty regularly for the last 10 – Don Robbins has bicycled from his home in Sidney eight miles to his job as an English teacher at Cony High Scool in Augusta.

It takes him about 30 minutes. It is mostly downhill. Heading back in the afternoon, he takes 40 minutes because of the uphills and frequent headwinds.

He does not commute by bike in midwinter. One year black ice ended his biking season in a skidding crash on Dec. 5. “I was pushing the season a litle too hard,” he confesses.

Don, a bearded, compact, lively man who is 54 and has taught for 33 years at Cony, also goes on long-distance bicycle trips. In 1989 he traveled alone from Seattle to Augusta in 30 days, camping out for free in woods and fields.

He likes how bicyling keeps him fit. “And I’m much more receptive to the world around me when I’m biking,” he says, contrasting it to travel by car.

Don is one of the few people who have built fitness into their everyday lives, not just squeezed it in or tacked it on.

I try, too. When I have errands I often walk. When I hike from my house to the Shop ‘n Save I can’t help noting that my few fellow pedestrians are, with some exceptions, the very old or very poor.

My twin teen-age sons resisted so strongly walking to school in the morning (about a mile away) that I finally relented and agreed to drive them every day, although they have to walk home. I keep reminding them they are crosscountry and track athletes. The Kenyans, who crush Americans in distance running, don’t drive to school, I also remind them.

I have to concede that I see very few students who are walkers. Ten years ago, when our oldest son was in high school, he never thought of asking for a ride. I believe that even such a short time ago quite a few more kids walked to school.

When I was a teen-ager in central Maine around 1960, the automobile was already taking possession of personal life, but even after I got a driver’s license I never used my parents’ car in the way kids do nowadays.

The car has transformed American life in many, many ways – the destruction of downtowns, air pollution, the damage to family and community life by increased mobility – but one totally clear result has been the exchange of health and fitness for the automobile’s seductive convenience.

Even during the past 15 years of the so-called “fitness boom,” Americans have continued, statistically, to get fatter. This newspaper is full of stories about this.

Unfortunately, the fitness boom is largely an upper-middle class, educated person’s phenomenon. The running-magazine readership surveys prove this. Maybe an interest in fitness is an understandable reaction by educated people to the increasing sedentary quality of American life.

When I arrive in the Shop ‘n Save parking lot I see the pickups idling with, in the wintertime, the heaters blasting and the young people inside in T-shirts even though it may be 10 degrees outside. They are smoking, drinking Pepsi, eating potato chips, bouncing to the car radio. They seem to be living in a cocoon of artificiality, separated from the natural world as well as from the joys of a healthy, strong body.

Even those people who are trying to do the right thing participate in ironies: driving long distances in order to run, buying expensive equipment simply to get into modest shape, and paying weight-reduction programs to lose weight. The expenditure of money got the overweight person in trouble in the first place!

Fitness is not something you have to purchase. I call this fitness materialism. With this idea, the poor will never think they will have the money to be fit.

The alternative is to consider fitness simply as part of your everyday life. Walk to work or school or the store. Require your kids to do the same. Don’t buy your son or daughter a car but a bicycle instead. How about taking up cross-country skiing or snowshoeing instead of snowmobiling? Support government funding of hiking and bicycling paths.

Don Robbins shows it is possible to build fitness into daily life. Only if we do that, I am convinced, will we become a healthy people.

Taking time for fitness, in the final analysis, may even, in a sense, “save” you a great deal of time.

“I’ve been lectured by young students who thought who thought I’d get a heart attack from all my biking, Don says.

“I told them that if I stopped doing it I might get a heart attack.”

Lance Tapley is the editor and publisher of Maine Running & Fitness magazine.