The Good Life: Trying out a road less travelled - exercise
“It is peaceful walking on those empty roads with the Tararua Range ahead of you.” Photo / Greg Dixon
To my amazement, and no doubt to the amazement of anyone who has ever known me, I have taken up exercising. Let’s not get carried away. I have taken up walking. For an hour, most days.
Greg, ever encouraging, says that I am barely even walking, more like wafting. It is certainly true that I don’t stride along Fitbitting, whatever that is. I most certainly don’t do that arm-pumping stuff.
I already look like a dick in my raggedy shorts, and socks that look as though they came from the secondhand shop where retired circus clowns send their old costumes to die.
I don’t wear serious power-walker gear such as those tight, bicycling-length, Lycra legging things. I don’t want to look like a complete dick. Also, I wouldn’t want to be sued for causing a driver to lose control due to hysterical laughing thus causing a serious traffic accident.
The really astonishing aspect of this “exercising” is that I love it. I spent PE classes at secondary school hiding behind bushes, fagging away on menthol cigs. The clouds of smoke may have been a bit of a giveaway.
I never really learnt to swim more than a few strokes before sinking to the bottom of the pool. I most certainly never learnt to dive, which I believed and still believe to be pointless and dangerous.
This did not prevent a sadistic PE teacher from making me compete in the annual swimming competitions. I started on the side of the pool nearest to the edge and performed my few strokes before sinking. This made me the clown of the swimming carnival and ought to have been classified as child abuse.
You don’t see many people walking on our country roads. There is one geezer, out in all weathers in his high-vis vest and enormous moustache.
He is not friendly. Unfriendly people in the country are known as people not worth wasting a wave on. If you see someone in a car, or more likely a ute or a truck, or on a horse or a tractor, you wave, and they wave back. Wave may be overstating it.
A country wave means a lift of the hand or the reins. And the merest lifting of a chin. You don’t see many cars. When you do, it is usually driven by somebody you know. Because only weirdos walk in the country, they invariably stop and offer you a lift.