MOVE FOR YOUR LIFE

It happened again. I had been writing for more than an hour and got up to stretch. I groaned. I creaked. I ached. At 84, I felt 184. But I heard that little insistent voice again: Move! MOVE! So I groaned once more, put on shoes and a light sweater, closed the door after me, and went. I live in a nice neighborhood: quiet, safe streets, rare traffic, all dogs on leashes, and a few hills to make thing interesting.
The first two blocks, my left ankle twinged. Forget it. Keep going. The third block, my left knee complained. Never mind. Ten more minutes should do it.
Sure enough, the magic began as usual, slowly but steadily. The legs smoothed into their thankful stride with a pleasant rhythm, my lungs took in the keen air, fresh from its trip across the Pacific. Thirty minutes later I returned feeling, well, maybe still 84, but a lively, invigorated, energized 84.
For starters, walking makes the heart pump better. That's all the heart is anyway: a pump. It pumps blood through 60,000 miles of blood vessels. Blood? Well, blood carries food, transports waste materials, regulates water constancy and body temperature, fights infection, distributes hormones and enzymes, and especially oxygen. Further, it helps bolster patients before operations, cures formerly fatal forms of anemia, heals terrible burns, halts a serious kidney disease which attacks young people, and combats cirrhosis of the liver. Not bad. And walking increases the heart rate, the heart gets bigger and stronger, letting it pump more blood . So far, so good.
Now, arteries carry the blood from the heart (call them garden hoses if you want). And as they wander through the body they become smaller and are called capillaries--like roads leading away from a freeway. The capillaries carry blood everywhere: muscles, spinal cord, brain, organs, lungs. This is called your circulatory system.
Still with me? It gets better.
I said oxygen, didn't I? Where does it come from? Obviously, from the lungs. Where does it go? Into the blood stream. How does it get there? Through the lung's cellular walls. But here's the kicker. As we walk, the blood vessels in the lungs dilate, allowing more oxygen into the blood stream. As we walk, the "hoses" get bigger, including the capillaries, allowing the blood to flow more freely. As we walk, the blood's hemoglobin concentration rises which allows the blood to carry more oxygen than usual. As we walk, the muscles become oiled, as if a vast tide were seeping into the spaces between the muscle walls. And, most amazing of all, as we walk the heart becomes a h-e-a-(r)-t. Walk long enough and "Metabolism's cellular furnaces generate heat, and [interior] furnaces roar with infinite metabolic fires." Whoohee!
Look, if you don't believe me, try it. Forget about those two hour walks you read about. Daunting. Put them out of your mind. Don't even think about them. Instead, put on your shoes, a sweater if you think you need it, and walk to the end of the block and back. That's it. Maybe four minutes total. Three minutes if four is too long. But one more thing: breath as you walk. Count eight steps, but hold your breath for the last two counts (seven and eight) and try to force your breath out through your chest walls and your abdomen. Release your breath slowly during next eight counts. Repeat. How much better will you feel after all this. Maybe not much, but a little (the farther you walk, the better you'll feel).
Okay, so one walk isn't enough, is it. Do it again tomorrow, but this time walk one house further, then return. Try again the next day and go two houses beyond. Then . . . but you knnow what's coming, don't you. You're onto me. So let's talk about the real problem.
"I'm too tired."
Ah, yes.
"Maybe tomorrow."
Yes, I hear you.
Now listen to me. There are two "tireds:" active and sedentary. Which are you? If you've played six sets of tennis or dug ditches for an hour, you're tired. But if you've been at the office all day, or watched an hour or more of television . . . . guess what? Sitting or standing in one position for too long, the used blood in the lower part of the body doesn't get the push it needs to return to the heart. That is why you can experience fatigue or sluggishness after sitting or standing for a long time or after a long car or plane ride. Then, especially then, is when you need to move actively.
"The human body was made to move," says Dr. Bernadine Healy in U.S. News & World Report (March 24, 2003); the longer it stagnates, the weirder things get--like clots forming in the deep veins of the leg . . . With a few hours of immobility, blood clotting is revved up as platelets clump and increase in number . . . compounding this is dehydration, which makes the blood thicker, and swelling of the ankles, which compresses veins . . . Most of the time the body dissolves these clots in the legs with its own chemical genius, [but only] as you start moving . . ."
Think of it this way: I once signed up to teach chss to children. The introduction put me under a teacher for a trial run. The children, about seven to ten years of age, gathered in front of the blackboard for the first half hour, then separated into twosomes for individual games. I wandered among them, checking moves, noticing how pleasantly silent they were--no yelling, no kicking, no fighting , not even whispering. But then I soon became aware of something else: not one of the approximately two dozen children was sitting still; it was all a squirming mass. They looked more like swimmers than chess players, certainly not immobile figures huddled over a board, unblinking and almost pulseless. These twitching, fidgeting creatures would probably, with poor luck, calm down as older teenagers, become too busy as adults, enter their 50's in panic and their sixties with dread.
Frightening!
Author James Michener once said, "A man who drops out of recreation after an active youth is committing slow suicide."
What happens is not merely a misconception but a fatal flaw, developing so insidiously that, like escaping gas or the loss of oxygen in high-flying plane, it becomes unnoticeable until too late. The years go by, often very quickly, in the blink of an eye.
"I'll do it tomorrow."
"I have years ahead of me."
"What, me worry?"
To repeat, man was made to move. To breath, to eat, to sleep . . . and to move. His legs and feet were fashioned for propulsion. He can sit down, he can lay down. But since that latter is his eventual position at the end, it would be better if he stayed vertical and made the most of this luxury.
After all, the old sports axiom applies to life, too: It isn't how you start, its how you finish.