Exercise is fundamentally an odd thing when we do it not for any purpose but itself.
I mean, in years and centuries gone by, the condition of Mankind was that it worked hard to survive, to get sufficient bread and meat and water in its bellies to keep both hope and strength alive from one day to the next. For vast swathes of Mankind today, that's actually still the way of life - children pickking over rubbish dumps, men and women both in fields, women frankly doing a damn site more besides because their work is undervalued and not seen to have a designated end in any day. Labourers with hands and backs doing jobs that demand fuel and run their bodies at a high metabolic rate.
Then there are people like me.
Indisputable first-worlders, with, to coin a phrase, 'world enough and time' to have grown both fat and lazy (though it's important to understand the two are not in any way necessarily synonymous), plying skills that only have any value whatsoever in an information economy, and plying them from behind desks, at which we sit in some degree of comfort. For us, exercise is not a part of the natural rhythm of our lives, and so we do the oddest things in pursuit of it, in our little quests to burn off the calories we take in, in a kind of weird, false hat-tip to our fellow men and women who still burn energy day in, day out as part of the business of keeping their lives together. We go to gyms, and lie about it, pretending to enjoy ourselves. We walk pets in an effort to keep them and ourselves more healthy.
Or in my case, we go for long walks.
This is what I mean by exercise being an odd thing to do just for its own sake. If you have a purpose to your moving about, and you're a man, then when the purpose is satisfied, more than likely, you stop. If you're a woman of course, the thing no-one ever expressly tells you is that the purpose is never bloddy satisfied, but I digress. If you're just walking for the sake of walking, you actually need an equally false marker or moment to get you to stop doing it.
Case in point. I went walking relatively early today, so as to make the most of the dwindling daylight. I went up the road to my familiar gas station (the Norton Gas Station, for anyone who knows it), and the first roundabout leading to Dowlais. By which point, I'd gone a disappointing 2400 steps. I did the maths, and realised if I turned around then and went home, it would be fewer than 5000. But here's the thing. At that point, the exercise was still new to my system today, and was beginning to hurt me. But I shrugged at the numbers, and pushed on up the hill (yes, another hill. Seriously, the town's just made of hills) to a second roundabout, at a kind of second, 'No really, are you sure you want to go here?' gateway to Dowlais (Dowlais seems to be entirely unconvinced people should really want to go there). By the time I got there, the pain of the newness had worn off, but the numbers were starting to look a bit more interesing - somthing over 3000 steps done, meaning 6000 if I just turned round. I seriously considered it. Then I turned left, seeing a bus stop up another divergent hill. 'I'll just go to that, and that can be my past-the-second-roundabout marker,' I thought.
Reached it. Didn't count the steps. Pushed on. I'd entered the Numb Zone.
The Numb Zone is that point where your limbs have become used to the action you're taking, and so the usual markers that tell you 'you should stop now' have been quitened, because you've clicked in to the activity, and gotten 'in' to the doing of it. I walked through Dowlais, past a couple of familiar landmarks, and out into less familiar territory as the January sun thought 'Fuck this for a game of soldiers' and went to hide. I reached the point where I was on an unfamiliar road, by an unfamiliar church or chapel, and had the conscious thought that 'Either this goes round in a circle of the town, down through the Gurnos...orrrr it doesn't, and ends up somewhere in Pontsticill, which is not where I want to be, in the dark, on a Sunday night.'
All hail Google Maps, the Geographic Fuckwit's Friend. Turned out I'd missed the Gurnos turning, and was indeed heading out towards Pontsticill, land of reservoirs, evil bastard hills of distinction, sheep, road with no pavement and not a whole fuck of a lot else.
I turned round, went back to the turning I'd missed, walked along the road to the Gurnos, through an industrial estate, round the back of my old school, down past a house I used to live in, up and over another hill, Sycamore Road, where my grandmother used to live, and where, as she used to say, 'seven winds get together for a discussion on where to blow.' And from there, a simple drop down through the rest of the Gurnos back to house, coming mercifully to it from the top, rather than having to deal with the two evil bastard hills on which I technically now live, and about which I've recently bitched.
All in all, that'll get you over 12,000 steps. And the really weird thing is that as I sit here now, safely home and back behind my desk, I don't feel like I've done much at all, don't feel anything like as dead as shorter distances have recently made me. I'm not fool enough to think I'm yet getting accustomed to the whole wretched business of walking for the sake of it. it's the power of the Numb Zone - when you push past the initial pain of unexpected movement, and you just keep doing a thing. Were the streets better lit and were there not Sherlock to be home for and soup to be had, I could well have carried on for thousands more steps tonight, until the Numb Zone ran out and the next zone of 'No, really, if you keep this shit up, I'm gonna hurt you' kicked in.
So all hail the Numb Zone, and me finding a satisfying new route that gives me my daily step count. Takes a fuck of a long time which may not be practical on a day-job day, but still - at least now I know that it's there.
No comments:
Post a Comment