I always loved playing baseball and basketball with my grandma. She’d always make a point of telling us that when she was growing up (Southern MO) that the boys wanted her to play on their teams!
I rode my mountain bike to sunrise service.Was 45 minutes early and it was so cold I ran 3 miles to keep warm.
We had some girls teams in high school – but none of the honors-level girls played sports. Not a single one of my friends played sports – including the guys (oops, just checked my HS yearbook – couple guys ran track, couple girls played tennis). So very different from today’s high school girls.
My father loved sports, and he loved to play them with me. So I had a baseball glove, learned how to throw properly, and played tennis. My ability to throw a baseball was a key point in the success of my relationship with my husband.
My favorite high school story – boys and girls had separate gym. One day, a bunch of us girls started running around the track. The boys PE teacher kicked us off the track, telling us it was only for the boys. We didn’t even think to protest. Oh, the good old days. (And the lumpy one-piece gym suits we wore – ugliest most unattractive things ever – didn’t inspire love for PE.)
I remember those one piece gym suits. They were hideous. No idea why we were not allowed to wear the T shirts and shorts like the guys wore. Another reason P.E. was traumatic.
Did any of you grow up in sedentary families? We were all normal weight, but the only real exercise we got was swimming (we had a backyard pool). My dad had been a good athlete and had played in a softball league, and my mom played racquetball and tennis with friends, but it never would have occurred to us to go for a walk after dinner or to do a real athletic activity. Running was what you did if you missed the bus.
My D was/is a natural athlete (I didn’t get that gene) and was always taking us swimming, ice skating, biking, tennis, etc. Unfortunately he did not understand why unlike my siblings, I had such a hard time “catching on” to anything athletic. I discovered much later that I have an issue with proprioception, Back then no one knew about that.
And now for a take on high school sports from a guy’s perspective. I played football in Jr. High and my freshman tear of high school but quit when the high school coach instructed us to intentionally injure opposing players to take them out of the game. That was the last school sanctioned game I played. I then tried wrestling but quit that when the coach instructed the team to practice wearing plastic sweat pants and shirts as a way to lose weight and make weight. Everyone was obsessed with making weight to the point of medically dangerous practices. At that point I was done with school sanctioned sports. The mentality and culture that existed on the boys teams, between win at any cost and toxic testosterone machismo chips on shoulders, was unhealthy and dangerous. Instead, I started pursuing my own fitness challenges and goals through weight lifting, long distance running and self coached spring board diving. My freshman year of college, at a major state university in Pa, I decided to do a walk on try out for the diving team and was actually accepted. The mindset of training for individual skill based competition was much more to my liking than my high school experiences. I left that school after my freshman year and transferred to a small private college outside of Boston. It didn’t have a diving team but did have a karate team that engaged in NCAA sanctioned competitions with other area colleges and I ended up finding a new home there and ultimately became the team captain. My best memories were “special training” weekends where we lived in our gi and spent the weekend running barefoot all around Boston practicing our martial arts as we ran around like a bunch of loonies. We would then end the training weekend with dinner at a Japanese steak house run by kendo practioners. The owners always put us in a private room. We would drink prodigious amounts of beer which usually ended with someone trying to break an empty bottle mid air with a kick or a punch or one of the waitstaff breaking a bottle with a sword as we all fell off our chairs laughing hysterically at what kind of idiots we were. As nuts as it all was and notwithstanding the physical violence of our fights, there was a respect for each other and our opponents, a spirituality to what we were doing and a mind-body connection that was very much different than the malicious violence I experienced in high school sports. We never trained for the purpose of injuring an opponent even though injuries could be a consequence of what we did. In fact, at tournaments, on occasion a competitor came in with a mindset of trying to hurt an opponent to take the opponent out of the competition. Those persons got identified quickly and were dealt with.
Michael- I love your stories!
My mother/stepfather were pretty sedentary. My mother (polio survivor and partially paralyzed legs) liked to “swim”, but didn’t ever want to get her hair wet. She would do laps in the pool, though. My father (also polio survivor with some physical impact but less than my mother) and stepmother were a little more active and did like to do easy hikes in the Blue Ridge Mountains. My grandfather played sports with me when I was young- taught me how to throw a football and baseball. I loved shooting baskets as a teenager and finally got my own hoop at our Dallas house for my 40th birthday!
3.5 miles this morning before heading over to my daughter’s church service. 37 mile week.
My parents were always pretty active. Dad played varsity basketball and continued to play hockey until his accident. He also coached me in various sports while I was growing up. Mom is a swimmer and walks multiple miles every day (when the weather is cooperating).
I think I overdid it these last few days. Woke up very sore but luckily it seems much more like over-used muscle pain rather than joint pain. I need to catch up on reading and writing today anyway so today will be a rest day 
I’m looking for opinions/facts/whatever on body-fat-measuring scales. I have a Tanita scale, and have never really questioned its relative accuracy until recently. However, my daughter put her age and height in (thirty years younger and an inch taller) as one setting and… when I weighed myself as a slightly taller thirty year old, suddenly my body fat was 5% lower. So I started playing around with the settings. If I’m 45 (not 60) and the correct height, my body fat is 3% lower. If I step into salt water, then dry my feet on the bath mat (but not completely), down 7% body fat. If I drink two large glasses of water, so I weigh two pounds more… my body fat goes up a percent. If I change my sex so I’m a guy, suddenly I’m down 10%.
The feeling I get is that the conductivity pads are placebos and don’t actually measure anything. The instructions say to moisten feet on a damp towel before using and have the conditions the same from day to day, but if the percentage changes when I change my sex or age, it seems to me that the value is fundamentally meaningless–even if you attempt to compare it to itself. If it’s a mathematical algorithm and has nothing to do with the actual conductivity measured, I could look it up in a table and get results that are about as accurate.
I know the gold standard for body fat measurement (and bone density too) is a DEXA scan. I have no idea how to get a DEXA scan done outside of a medical setting.
For my family, running and walking had to have a purpose…
Mr. just shared with me an interesting observation - his Fitbit correctly assigned the time between 1 and 2 pm yesterday as “outdoor biking.” Wow. There is apparently an algorithm that matches HR and frequency of “steps” to a common activity. My 50-minute run was a “run.”
Dmd - don’t laugh, but check Groupon. My Groupon is offering a deal on DEXA scanning at a downtown location at half off. Am considering buying it. It appears to be a private place that just does full body DEXAs for sports management and weight loss.
(My H actually has a DEXA machine in his office - but it’s the kind where you insert your hand for bone density measurement, so that’s of no help here!)
BB - my Fitbit identifies some activity as well. I walked for 1.5 hours (with a Cc-er!) on Friday and it picked it up without my having to manually enter it.
The body fat measuring scales are notoriously inaccurate and unreliable. I would go as far as to say that you can’t even use them as a relative measure of progress you may be making. Time of day, hydration status and limitations of the technology of bio-impedance all play a role. I’ve used them from various manufacturers including Tanita. In fact, when I decided to lose weight and dropped close to 35 pounds while lifting weights and cycling 6 days per week, the scale didn’t even register a 5% loss in body fat. In comparison, using lab quality skin fold calipers with an experienced practitioner, my body fat went from like 25% to 11.5! Paying for that added feature in a scale is, in my view, a waste of money. If you want a scale, get one for what it can really do - measure weight - and get one with a least 2 sensors under the top plate for improved accuracy. If you want to measure fat at home, get a good set of calipers and learn how to use them. There is a learning curve and practice is necessary to get consistency. Even if the results are not accurate in absolute terms, you can get consistent relative readings. Good calipers are a couple of hundred bucks. If you want to splurge and get the state of the art technology used by upscale gyms and home use at a moderate cost for such things, get an ultrasound unit from Body Matrix. The home version (which I have) costs $495 and is the same as the commercial unit except that the commercial unit has a more rugged shell and cord, a sturdy carrying case, and software that permits unlimited user profiles instead of the 5 person limit on the home version.
The March 2016 issue of Consumer Reports reviews high tech scales. The body fat measurements were off between 21 to 34 percent versus a Bod Pod measurement.
I have a Tanita scale. A few years ago I did a major motivated ‘get fit’ plan. At some point my weight plateaued, but my body fat as measured by the Tanita scale continued to decline. So even if it wasn’t accurate it was great motivation.
My dads “activity” was working (he was a delivery driver) or gardening. My mom would takes walks and run after us. She however has been a great example after we have grown up and at age 83 still walks a few miles daily and swims laps probably 4 days a week. She still works part time at her local Y at age 83 !!!
My older brother was active in sports - has remained fairly active as he ages. My older sister played no sports but enjoys recreational bike riding, a little jogging, walking as she enters her 60’s. My youngest brother - almost 9 years younger - was involved in no sports as a kid - but now as an adult he lives in NYC and has run a few marathons and many halfs, bikes a lot and enjoys tennis a bit - go figure! I was pretty much a chubby grade schooler and HATED sports - I did like riding my bike and we were to the neighborhood pool daily in the summer.
While we weren’t involved in lots of sports our parents DEFINITELY sent us “out to play” all the time.
Great Easter at our home today - sunny and 72. Over 15,000 steps just keeping busy all day. Made some great new veggie dishes including a hot citrus fennel dish, a carmelized onion dip using whole milk yogurt and topped with satueed leeks. Yum.
@BunsenBurner If you go into the settings for your Fitbit, you’ll see there’s a list of “automatically recognized exercises.” They include biking, walking, running, elliptical, and you can set a time frame when the Fitbit records the activity. The default is 15 minutes.
I just totally pigged out for dinner tonight. Went to a favorite Mexican place and shared a huge dish of nachos loaded with cheese and refried beans, and then the entry came out. I left a fair amount on my plate, but that was a lot of food. On the plus side, walked almost 17,000 steps.
My father was very active in sports when he was younger, but not when I knew him. My mother was a total slug. Also swam with her head out of the water, didn’t own a pair of sneakers until she was in her 70s. She was overweight her entire life. As I said earlier, my father and I did some active things together, but we never did anything active as a family. My husband and I were/are very different – we took our daughter biking and hiking regularly, for example. She went through a period when she hated hiking (her entire teens) but she now loves it, and she exercises frequently.
My father was an avid ocean swimmer well into his seventies and one of the great gifts he gave me was teaching me how to swim at a very young age. We started out in a pool where the shallow end was 4 ft deep and deeper than I was tall. I quickly got to the point where I could swim innumerable widths of the pool in the shallow end but had an irrational fear of the deep end. One day, my father decided that it was time to get over that so when we were done, as we walked past the deep end towards the locker room, he hip checked me into the pool. It was literally sink or swim and I swam! He then started to take me into the ocean with him and by the time I was 8, I was swimming with him out past the breakers in the ocean. He taught me how to handle breaking surf, swim my way out of rip tides and conserve my energy by timing and riding the ebbs and flows and swells. He also had an interesting way of teaching me not to panic in the water and to have confidence in my abilities. When we were in the water together, at any time, without warning, he would launch himself at me for a no holds barred wrestling match on the surface and below. He was 6 ft and 185 pounds and our wrestling matches were epic. By the time I was 15, nothing fazed me in the water. While I had a healthy respect for the ocean, I was as much at home on its surface or beneath as I was on the beach. The summer of my 15th birthday, I took a senior life saving certification course. The instructor would drill us by playing the role of a panicking victim who attacked his rescuers with front and rear choke holds or by pushing rescuers under in an attempt to climb the rescuer to get out of the water. One day, he said to me with frustration that no matter what he did to me, he couldn’t get me to panic or lose control. I just smiled and told him that if he had been raised by my father, he would understand why. My father is now 88 and physically frail but none-the-less is in the pool swimming 6 days per week. Swimming is still an ingrained part of his life.
“If you go into the settings for your Fitbit, you’ll see there’s a list of “automatically recognized exercises.” They include biking, walking, running, elliptical, and you can set a time frame when the Fitbit records the activity. The default is 15 minutes.”
Yes, thanks, I was aware of that. I was just musing that programmers were able to create an algorithm detecting “outdoor biking”. Running and walking is easy to detect based on heart rate and step count during given period (e.g., consistent rate of acquirung step count and a HR about 110-120 would mean walking, if the HR goes above 135, it would be already running). With “outdoor biking”, there is ideally no step count. Nor should fitbit “know” how far the wearer moved without a built in GPS… However, there is an occasional step or two (because of the bumpiness of the ride) and elevation changes, so some specific sort of HR, step count, and elevation combo must have been consistently associated with biking for Fitbit to program it as such. Cool.
I swam before I could walk. I come from an avid water family and we always had some sort of body of water around - pool, lake, etc. When my mom was a young, a child she babysat fell into a pool and drowned (not while she was babysitting them!). So there was never an option to not know how to swim. We did those mommy and me classes when I was just a few months old. Growing up, my mom joked that I was one day just going to grow gills and live in my natural habitat. I would literally spend 10+ hours a day swimming and never think twice about it.
However, I’ve always had an intense fear of boats and open water. I’ve had a reoccurring dream since I was little that I (as someone else) was on a boat which overturned and I drowned in open water. To this day, I hate boats and open water swimming. I’ll do it but I’m a nervous wreck the whole time.
Mr R is a swimmer too. By coincidence, we both swam backstroke in high school. When we went to adopt our new-ish dog, my only hope was that she was a water dog. When I fell in love with one listed as a “lab mix” I figured it was fate. (I’m pretty sure she’s not a lab but she LOVES the water. In my avatar, she’s sitting in the bathtub because I dared to take a bath without the door fully latched and in she came.)
Can anyone tell that I really really miss the water? 
If my treatment goes well this week, my boys are taking me to an aquatic center as a treat. 
I forgot to mention that I saw an amazing thing on the trail on Saturday: a guy who looked like he was older than 80 was running on the trail, clearly enjoying it! He was more than half a mile from any place where one can reasonably enter the trail without crawling through bramble or swimming across the river, so I assume he ran at least a couple of miles.
I wish to be like him when I grow up.