Exercise is Something for an Oldster to Shun

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

of the Minneapolis Tribune editorial page staff

published by the StarTribune

May 29, 1954

   I WAS with some foolish fellows the other evening who were showing off by standing stiff-legged and bending over to touch their toes.  I don't know what they were trying to prove unless it was imbecility.  For me it would be.  I cannot bend over and even reach my kneecaps and have no desire to try.  It's tough enough lacing my shoes each morning.

   Anyhow I deem the whole business of exercise as silly for anyone past 30 and wish I could escape it entirely.  I wish I didn't have to push a lawnmower or work black dirt into the lawn, or clean up the winter's infestation of debris and junk, and wash windows and put up screens.  Anyone victimized by the spring cleanup who still has a taste for tennis or softball or push-ups is either young or crazy.

   IN A TIME of madness a couple of weeks ago I let myself in for some utterly fruitless exercise.  I purchased a portion of black dirt, a bag of fertilier and a sack of seed.  I resolved to convert my submarginal plot into a showplace--to make a dozen spears of grass flourish where one had languished before.

   The results have been about what I knew in my heart they would be--less than spectacular.  I have done everything but sit up nights with my lawn and can detect little reward for my husbandry.  I have, however, no word of reproach for the black dirt, fertilizer or grass seed, although the price of seed might convince the credulous that the stuff will grow on a tile floor.  The fault is entirely mine.   Grass may survive pestilence, blight or drought.  It cannot survive me.  All I get for such labor is exercise--and exercise I can do without.

   THEY SOUNDED me out the other day about a brand of exertion that is completely abhorrent.  They wanted me to play in a church baseball league.  The mere thought of it gave me a charley horse.

   The fact was brought home to me six years ago that nobody on the far side of 40 should have any truck with baseball besides consuming peanuts and hot dogs and hurling epithets at the umpire.

   At that time I got involved in a game and made a clean hit to centerfield.  I was thrown out trying to stretch it into a single and there has been a distinct tenderness around the right femur ever since.

   I HAD BEEN forewarned several years earlier, while living out west, that exercise was for the birds--but not for one gone flaccid from pecking a typewriter.  I joined the "Y", figuring that the body, once a thing of sinewy and rippling responsiveness needed firming up.

   I swam.  I galloped around the indoor track, hung over the parallel bars and shot baskets.  Then I somehow got entangled in a basketball game with a bunch of kids and aged five years in as many minutes. It was then that I knew the havoc time had wrought.

   When I afterward looked at myself in the locker room mirror I beheld a stranger.  The face was a crimson blob.  The jaw hung slack.  The eyes were those of a man wallowing in a hangover.

   There were no more trips to the muscle factory.  I realized that I was getting on.

   MY WIFE tells me I should take up golf.  But a man has his pride.  I took up golf once, 18 holes of it, and was so bad that even among a bunch of duffers I was a man apart.  If I ever golf again I'll have my wife pack a picnic lunch that I can eat under a tree, remote from the fairway, In the general locality of where I suspect my ball to be.

   If you don't spend 90 per cent of your time hunting the ball, you get in a lot of good walking playing golf, though.  And what is better than walking for the middle-aged?  What, in truth, is left but walking?

   If you take it slow and rest thoroughly afterward it is not overtaxing.  The wonders of nature are all about you--lilacs, pussy willows, lobelia, chicory, wild columbine
 and such.  There are beer cans to kick out of the path.  There is time to read any billboards within sight; time to sit under a tree and gain new strength from the good earth; time to think about those yesterdays when spring meant something.

   The next time my wife says we ought to take a walk around Lake Harriet I'm going to surprise her and go.  I want to see if I'm up to it.  We made the junket once--back in '47--and it was quite a pleasant hike, though a bit tiring.  This time I plan to take my cane.

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