Exercise

I like exercise. I even like sports, to some degree. By exercise I mean the sports that you do yourself, and by sports I mean sports in general, as performed by other people. I used to hate sports. I still hate some of them, like ice hockey. Yechhh. I hate it because of its vulgarity and the general ugliness, drunkenness and belligerence of the audience that is drawn to it. And I can't understand why all sports announcers in television have really annoying voices. I guess it's required nowadays, but why, and by whom? Are they trying to impel people from sports for some reason?

But as I was saying, exercise is good for you. There are basically two ways to relate to exercise. Either you hate it or love it. Well, in reality, most people are probably in between, as they bloody well tend to be in all matters, but once again, I will simplify things to make them funnier.

I have a theory on exercise. I imagine the people who hate exercise also have one, and I think it goes like this: exercise is hard and it must be avoided to minimize the pain. My theory goes as follows: exercise is hard, but the more you do it, the easier it gets, and thus the pain is minimized. Think about it: if you always avoid taking the stairs, because you don't like becoming breathless, your physical condition will gradually deteriorate. But if you always take the stairs instead of the elevator, your physical condition will improve, and over time, you will not become breathless anymore. So basically, in the long term, you can't avoid pain by avoiding exercise. Well, I guess, theoretically, you could, but you'd have to gradually exercise less and less, and die very quickly (and somehow painlessly) after becoming unable to walk from the couch to the fridge because of this restriction.

I really like running. I've sometimes recommended running to other people, and among the reasons why they don't want to try it I've heard
- they don't like sweating
- it's hard, you become breathless, and so on
- they once saw a guy running in the summer and his face was really red and it looked painful.

Of course it's hard in the beginning. Anything is hard at first. Learning to walk takes a long time. When you learn how to ride a bicycle, you tend to fall over a lot. You don't know how to swim efficiently by instinct because you're not a fish. Everyone is not a web programmer, even though everyone's had a html course in school. Sorry, I digress.

When you begin running, you must practice a bit and start slowly. Eventually, you will become better at it and it won't be so hard anymore. And eventually, you will enjoy running. People exercise because it makes them feel good. Some of the ways that I feel good in after exercise are
- physical relaxation
- some kind of chemical euphoria (endorphines or something)
- moral superiority (because I exercised while you were munching chips on the couch, weren't you?)
- satisfaction of competitive instincts (because I ran faster than some fat beginners and a grandma on a bicycle)
- the knowledge that my lifespan is once again expanded and the rest of it is likely to be relatively pain-free.

Also, for the non-exercisers, I'd like to add that other benefits of exercising include
- not breaking a sweat because of eating
- not having to cough up your lungs because you ran 20 metres to catch a bus
- the heartattacks will diminish significantly.

I know, this might sound a bit patronising and contemptuous. But if you think about it, the superiority is also yours to take, free, or at least relatively cheap, at the price of decent running shoes. Well, I don't even know why I'm writing this, because judging by the excellent taste in the blogs you choose to read, you must be extremely attractive and probably also a triathlonist who could run, bicycle and swim circles around me. I just wrote it because I'm the man around here and I do whatever I feel like and... ok, honey, I'll come to bed right away.