Exercise in Futility

Warning: this is not medical advice, it is merely a personal conclusion and not necessarily applicable to anyone else! Listen to your doctor, not your blogger.

I hate exercising; I view it as a total waste of my time, so I therefore never do it unless it is incidental to what I'm already doing. I don't mind playing sports, but I'd never play a sport simply for the exercise. I play despite the exercise, not for it.

I don't know whether my loathing for exercise is exactly defensible scientifically, but I'm at least skeptical that it's any good for me personally, even if it might be good for the mythical "average person" in a statistical way. The problem is that statistics are so broad as to often be meaningless for any given individual.

At the very least, I'd like some questions answered before I start any sort of exercise regimen:

- If exercise does prolong your life, will it prolong it enough to regain all the miserable hours spent exercising, hours that could have been spent in all sorts of more productive pursuits?

- If the exercise hours are regained or even surpassed, is it a good trade to give away time in your prime years in exchange for time in your senior years when you'll likely be feeble, senile, and have a lower quality of life?

- Everyone talks about its benefits to your cardiovascular health, but no one talks about the trade-off to your joints. Have you ever noticed how often athletes have surgery on their knees, shoulders, etc? In my family, there is no history of cardiovascular problems, but there is a history of lousy knees and shoulders, so instead of blanket advice that everyone should exercise, shouldn't the advice be tailored a little bit to your individual risk factors? Based on my family history, my joints are a bigger concern than my heart, and I'd like to save wear and tear on them as much as possible. Even forget the athletes, just look at your own acquaintances who play sports and make a point of being physically active -- I've never seen such a parade of injuries and pains! Dislocated disk, dislocated shoulder, fractured wrist, sprained ankle, twisted knee, foot pain, broken finger, bruised coccyx, pulled hamstring, torn tendon, premature arthritis, and on and on. So add surgery and therapy time to your lost youth time (and lost $$ too), especially if you do high impact exercise like running, tennis, football, etc. And add misery to your quality of life if you don't opt for the surgery!

- Living in NY, I walk a lot more than the average American, and every time I go grocery shopping I shlepp everything back on foot. How does this factor into the equation?

- Some studies conclude that exercise prolongs life. But is it the exercise itself, or is it the resulting weight loss, mental relaxation, meditation time, etc that are prolonging life? What if you maintain a healthy weight, get meditation time in other ways, and keep your mind fresh and active through other activities/hobbies?

Exercise is used today as a mental meditation and focus, a time away from TV and modern pressures, but what a sorry, lame tool to achieve that! There is an easier way to get some meditation time away from the TV: turn it off. We used to have such productive pastimes like writing songs and poetry, learning musical instruments, cooking, carving, building, etc.

Exercise is also used as a natural way to get high, an endorphin rush I've heard it described as. But here again there is another more enjoyable activity that will give you and your partner an even better physical high, and an emotional one too.

When I was in 5th grade, my friend Aaron used to host fantastic slumber parties in his mansion. He's the only friend I ever had who lived in a mansion. It sat on what must have been several acres of land, and he owned several snowmobiles to explore it with.

As day turned to night, then night wore into the wee hours, we always had a contest to see who could stay awake the longest. The first person out was a total loser; we used green food coloring to give him a strange case of measles on his face the next morning when he brushed his teeth and looked in the mirror. Then, subsequent losers slipped off silently through the night, and those who remained conducted ever shorter role calls of who was still awake. And guess who always won?

It's a strange mixture of joy and sorrow to win this contest, because while I'm happy to have won it, there's no one there to witness my victory and share the celebration. I am all alone, my competitors have all drifted off to their dreamy reveries, leaving me to quietly contemplate my situation in the dark, not knowing what to do next except to try to join them in restful slumber as fast as I can.