Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro: 28 °C, hot, sunny, and slightly overcast.
An excellent hot, sweaty and stuffy Tuesday. When I started working out about a year and a half ago, I would do seven or eight exercises; now, I’m doing between 12 and 15. The time that I have allotted for working out is almost not enough anymore.
This is progression, serenity, and the feeling of well-being in what you are doing. Even if I start the morning unenthusiastically, by mid-morning I am already productive, and by the end I am highly productive and happy. I know I’m giving a lot of attention to exercise, but finding the proper exercise that makes you feel good is a natural game-changer.
From my experience, starting to exercise regularly was the start of my whole change. It was the first step, the first change, and from this one fundamental change in mindset, other changes automatically came.
I feel more secure, and from nowhere, new ideas appear that I would never have thought or felt possible. This is also related to walking. I have liked to walk since I was a very young child, from the age of seven or eight.
My parents, brother, and I lived in a middle-class semi-detached house with a small front garden and an enormous back garden that backed onto fields and woods, which eventually led to the canals.
From my earliest age, I remember my friends and me playing in the street, the fields, the woods, or even fishing in the canal two or three kilometres away. So, from a young age, there was an urge to walk.
My grandparents on my mother’s side lived in a small neighbouring village about four to five kilometres from where we lived. My relationship with my grandmother was much closer and more affectionate than with my mother. I would go religiously twice a week to visit and stay with my grandmother and grandfather.
Once during the week, either on Tuesdays or Wednesdays, depending on what my grandmother was cooking for dinner, all her food was good, and I loved it.
And every Sunday to have lunch together and to watch Formula One. At this time, Ayrton Senna was racing for McLaren and doing well. This was my Sunday, every Sunday, no matter what; it could be sweltering hot, torrential rain, Sleet, Snow, it wouldn’t matter, I would go without fail to stay the Sunday with my grandparents.
After some time, my mother began to feel jealous when I disappeared every Sunday to spend the day with my grandparents. As I got older, taller, and stronger, my mother began refusing to give me the bus fare to go and come back from my grandparents so that I would walk.
And even if she gave me the fare, many times, most of the time, I would save the money and keep it for myself and walk there and back from my grandparents’.
I have always preached the benefits of walking, but only now, at 56, do I know the real, actual value of walking. This is something I want to instil in Yasmin before I die. Walking is movement; movement keeps us alive.
Exercise is also movement, and that also keeps us alive. The truth is that any form of exercise, no matter how intense or not, keeps us well and alive and helps us with longevity. Thank you for the movement, the exercise, the changes, and my new future that is slowly appearing and taking shape.
Yasmin arrived later in the afternoon. She went and did functional training on the beach, returned, and had a shower. We played one game of chess before bed. She beat me with a brilliant checkmate. Sometimes, I feel I am underestimating my daughter and need to see more of what she can do and is capable of, because she surprises me more and more.
In bed by 11:00 pm.
Thank you.
Thanks for reading my blog. Check out my other posts and share your thoughts in the comments.
Richard
