Why Pilates this Year?

I’m not making New Year’s Resolutions. Since this year’s “resolutions” are pretty much the same as last year, I’d rather just call them recommitments. Among those recommitments is maintaining what I generously call my physique. Some may say that I would have to establish a decent physical form before maintaining it. To them, I say, “Take your wit and . . . well, you have a good point.”

There were a couple of events that occurred during 2009 that did not help me reach my goal of Herculean strength. First, I played too many video games. I did not curtail my hours of open-mouthed, catatonic staring; this year will be different. Second, I dropped my rock climbing gym membership. That left a void that I have filled with Pilates DVDs. Why Pilates? Well, if you eliminate everything else using my list of criteria, that’s what you’re left with.

When choosing an activity that will shape a graduate student’s body, there are many limitations. 1) It’s got to be cheap because I make less than a kindergarten teacher. 2) It’s best if it can be done at night because lab beckons all day. 3) It has to be relatively safe because I am like fine China: extremely fragile. 4) It cannot be repetitive because I can’t stand doing the same motion over and over—call it mental weakness if you want, all of you bikers, runners, and swimmers; I’m OK with that.

Cheap. High start-up or recurring costs are prohibitive. It is one of the reasons I stopped my climbing gym membership, which cost about $600 per year. This criterion also eliminates golf, biking, skiing, wakeboarding, sky-diving, and most types of classes with any decent instruction.

Convenient. Being in lab all day is optional, but given that I am nearing the end of my grad student life (hopefully), being in lab most of the day is pretty necessary. That means working out has to happen at night if it is going to happen at all. That was one of the appealing characteristics of climbing. I could eat an early dinner and then head to the gym. Of course, there are night leagues, but that brings me to the next criterion.

Safe. I could play football, but if you’ve ever seen a bowling ball fall on a twig . . . I’m the twig. Given my long history of breaking bones, I prefer something with little chance of hospitalization. Activities that are eliminated by this include team sports with any degree of contact: rugby, football, hockey, soccer, tag team wrestling, or baseball (what if the ball hits me?). Yes, you might call me wimpy, girly, or unmanly, but I call it knowing my limits and drawing conclusions based on a large sample size of data (Six broken bones).

Repetitive sports. Finally, anything that is repetitive is just plain boring (and maybe slightly painful) to me. It really makes it difficult for me to start exercising. OK, it also makes it difficult for me to keep going once I have started. And when I’m done, I don’t feel great that I did it. I just feel relieved that I don’t have to do it again for awhile. That means any event in a triathlon, except for the changing of clothes, is something I’d rather avoid. And if changing clothes occurred repeatedly over a thirty minute time span (or four hours), I would probably avoid that part, too.

What I am left with is Pilates DVDs. They fulfill all the criteria. For now, my New Year will begin with cheap, convenient, safe, and non-repetitive Pilates DVDs. I’ll take some pictures in the future so you can see the results. Or not—I don’t want to deter you from reading the blog in the future.

Why would I need help from sticks and stones, Part 2?

When I was 15, I was a week away from taking my driver’s license test. One week and a simple test stood between me and unfettered freedom—at least in my mind. But my body wasn’t quite on board. It had to go get broken, possibly causing life altering teen drama.

That Saturday morning was sunny and breezy: a perfect morning for a spring soccer game. The opponent was a team made up of my friends from my high school team. Twenty one buddies on the same field sounds like a big party to me. The whistle blew and the game was underway.

About midway through the game, I was dribbling up the field. I juked two or three guys as usual (or by accident) and then came up against a guy we’ll call Splevin Spletano to protect his identity. Splevin was probably one of the nicest guys I knew. I approached him doing my patented cross over spin move, aka, looking like a spaz. I’m sure he was afraid of getting burned like kindling or passed like salt or some other clever schoolyard simile.

Whatever he was thinking, the next thing I knew, I was on the ground. As I lay there, I immediately knew I had broken my collar bone. I’m sure there was no malice intended. In fact, I think I actually just didn’t quite get around his leg, which caused me to basically fall like a tree onto my shoulder. He was apologizing profusely before he even knew I had injured myself. Like I said, he was a nice guy.

I eventually got up, gingerly tested my arm, and subbed out. And then it was off to the hospital. The diagnosis was a fractured clavicle. Eight weeks sidelined from soccer and maybe social life.

For some reason the DMV won’t let you take a driving test when you have a broken collar bone. Perhaps, it’s because lifting your hand above 8 o’ clock on the steering wheel hurts like hell.

So, I had to reschedule my driving test. On top of that, my driving permit expired while I was incapacitated, and I couldn’t take the license test without it. Thus, I had to retake my written permit test before taking the driving piece. My freedom was stuck in neutral, seemingly in reverse. Was my teen life over?

If my life had been a movie, events preceding the soccer game would have included an approaching dance and the hottest and purest girl in school. There would have been non-threatening study dates, a quarterback stud competing for her attention, and a plain looking female confidant. The hot girl would attend the dance with me because I could drive her to it in a sweet ride. But now, without my license . . .

After the trip to the hospital, I would have sunken into a deep depression and explained to my wiser, plain-looking but blossoming friend that this broken collar bone had forever changed the course of my life--in a bad way. And then I’d finally fall for her even though she had wanted me since the second grade. Cue music, hand out tissues, roll credits. Or some version of that. That’s if my life were a movie.

But life wasn’t a movie. No dance. No hot girl. No homely turned comely female friend. Not even much of a social life to lament being lost. In retrospect, all that was lost was six to eight weeks of playing soccer and driving a car that was built the year before my current car. But at the time, it seemed like a slightly bigger deal.

The lesson? The lesson that I often forget after a bad day at work is that failures or set-backs seldomly ruin our lives. They usually end up as tiny blips on our life lines, resulting in no change in the overall trajectories. They aren't worth the stress.

After all, a bad day at work beats a broken collar bone. And a broken collar bone isn’t even that bad.