The Prologue

Why an exercise blog? Well, let me explain.

I am an outdoors man. Boating, kayaking, canoeing, rafting, hiking, geocaching; these are things I love doing. The woods are my battery charger and a good hike is a wonder for me, something I can't get enough of in any weather. I've never tried to build up muscles mainly due to the fact that I believed if I wasn't using them, it was wasted energy and effort. I stayed in shape through my activities and while I was not visible ripped, my doctor was very pleased with my physical condition. Now, don't get me wrong, if you are in a type of job where muscle helps, go for it. I was never a construction worker or an iron worker -- those guys benefit a lot from it. And professional athletes I don't watch (cause I'm not a fan of competitive sports at all, despite living in a basketball crazy state), but I understand why they would want the muscle mass. Me, not so much. When I turned thirty, I even went to my doctor and talked about it. I knew I was cresting that hill where things got harder with my body not bouncing back like it used to and there were things I was sure I needed to be preparing myself for. She was pleased and we discussed possibilities, she told me my good weight, and we both felt rather happy with the other. I read the Harvard study and took hydrogenated anything off my list and began to read ingredient lists and watch out for whole breads. Unlike a lot of guys my age, I was paying attention to my health and where I was.

A few years ago, I met a wonderful woman from Holland -- I'll spare the details here, but it's a true storybook romance that several people told us would make a better movie then "Hello, you've got mail" or "Sleepless in Seattle." We didn't care, we had each other and that's all we needed. That and two fairly well-behaved cats. :D We even moved to Montana to be near some friends of hers and I found work to help us get by. After a few years her health became dramatically worse one summer and we went to the local doctors to find out what was happening. Congestive Heart failure, sleep apnea, and several other conditions had sprung up out of literally no where and all activated in a year's time. There is still argument from her doctors on the source, but we had a guess. She grew up at -10 elevation in Holland and here we were 4900 in Montana ad the suspicion was that getting out of the heights would make a big difference to her body. Still, it was only a theory and we hesitated until her heart rate got down to 30% operation and she was on oxygen most of the day. That was the end of that and we high-tailed it out of Montana and back to North Carolina.

Now those who think (and we know two doctors in this category) that has nothing to do with it, here's our key evidence. Coming down the hills out of Montana, the feeling suddenly (at 1700 feet) came back into her feet and hands and she felt much better. We stopped and admired the effect and as we crossed into Wyoming and went back up again, the feeling went away again and her feet and hands tingled with pain. From then on (and still today) every time we approach that magic number of 1700, it happens again. Now, here in North Carolina she is moving much better and not using oxygen, but the doctors have her on multiple medications to solve the rest. She does have lots of pain which prevented her from getting out much or practically any kind of exercise and because I didn't like leaving her alone on those days it was particularly bad, I started packing on a few pounds as well. Plus, I was no longer in the wild on the edge of the woods, now we were down in the state and mostly in city areas without much wilderness around. So now that she is a bit more stable medically speaking, we needed to work exercise into her regimen, but carefully to not throw off the balance we had achieved. And being the adoring husband I hope I seem, I wanted to do stuff with her so I could monitor it as well and know everything was good. We decided to join a gym where she can work with some experts who can monitor what she does and help her get back on her feet.

I tried a gym once years before, but I lost more weight and stayed in better mental health by being outside, so had not continued the experiment past six months. So, I decided to try something new as well; my first blog. I'd heard of exercise blogs and thought to myself 'who the heck would want to read about exercise?' But surely a competent writer can make it interesting as well as informative and while I'm not a big writer working on a novel, surely I can use this as a good mental work-out as well. The idea? To share our health progress with friends and family scattered widely, practice my writing skills and be creative, and to keep a record we can look back at as well and see how far we have come. So with some trepidation, I enter the world of steam rooms, muscle competitions, and the land of athletes and hope that the jocks in the locker room (hence the title of this blog) will be nice to me. Heck, if we spend enough time around each other as our inspiring Dian Fossey did, maybe we can come to understand each other better and the world of gym enthusiasts.