Notebook: Getting off my duff
By Greg Campbell
8:59 a.m. MT Apr 10, 2008
It’s been slow going recovering from the winter ... throughout that dark and cold period, I went to bed early and slept as late as possible, grumpy about the lack of sunshine and full of excuses about why I couldn’t make it to the gym. Too cold to drum up any ambition, for one. Too dark in the early morning to want to get out of bed. And simply too tempting to just pitch some more wood into the fireplace to spend the evening curled up with blankets and a book.
Things will change in the spring, I told myself. Once the sunshine comes and stays later than 5 p.m., I’ll get back on the weight-lifting circuit, cut down on the cigars, maybe even tinker again with a sport that has so far frustrated my every attempt to take it seriously: running. Well, spring is here and so far all I’ve managed is a round of golf, not exactly the most vigorous of exercises. Part of my hesitation is that every warm sunny day lately seems to be followed by a grim day of freezing drizzle and lackluster snowfall. I know it’s as lame an excuse as can be mustered, but there it is. Winter, it seems, simply doesn’t want to end. And there’s part of me that doesn’t want it to regardless of how vocally I’ve been complaining about it ... when it’s finally gone for good, so are my thin excuses to put off physical activity.
What I need is a full-blown attitude adjustment. Driving to work with a cup of coffee and the heater on full blast, I often marvel at why every bicyclist I pass has this delirious smile on his or her face, which is usually red and streaked with snot and tears from the blisteringly cold morning wind. Torture, I think. But I know from the few times having done it that they’re smiling because the endorphin rush makes it worth having to put up with sticky, sweaty hair for the whole day.
It’s easy to go for years telling your out-of-town friends what a wonderful community you live in because of its recreational opportunities without ever partaking in those recreational opportunities. I talked with Tim Masters last weekend about what he’d been doing since he was released from prison in January, and his obvious answer was that he was catching up on everything he’d missed out on by being behind bars for more than nine years. That included hiking to the top of Horsetooth Mountain.
“Have you ever done that hike?” he asked.
“Uh, no,” I replied, mortified that I hadn’t. I felt like I was squandering the opportunities at my fingertips, opportunities that someone like Masters only dreamed of taking advantage of.
I have a long list of such passed-over chances to enjoy all that Fort Collins has to offer. My garage is like the old Elephant’s Graveyard where sporting equipment goes to die. Three bikes sit forlorn and forgotten, their only purpose now to serve as rusted and silent condemnations of my sedentary lifestyle. In a backpack somewhere I have enough rock climbing gear to scale El Capitan, but the stairs are the only things I climb any more. Racquetball racquets, leather footballs, an ancient pair of Rollerblades, a nearly-new snowboard and a whole shelf of backpacks and camping gear clutter the rest of the space. I could open my own Play It Again Sports in the driveway.
It seems like I go through these same machinations each year. Spring comes and I make a massive list of everything I plan to do but never have. The list invariably includes tubing the Poudre (can you believe I never have?), bouldering at Horsetooth, hiking pretty much anywhere around the foothills, backpack camping in Rocky Mountain National Park, becoming a true Biker Citizen in one of the most bicycle-friendly places in the United States, lifting weights until I can crack walnuts in the crook of my elbow, joining a volleyball league and becoming enough of a jogger that I can enter the odd 5K or two every once in awhile. But what ends up happening is that I end up parked at an Old Town patio bar on the weekends drinking 90 Shilling, smoking a Cohiba after eating a huge hamburger and getting a suntan. Before I know it, it’s winter again.
Yes, patio bars are an important part of what makes Fort Collins such a cool place to live—at least for me—but there’s so much more that I’m missing out on, and for no good reason other than inertia. Considering that our community goes through a regularly scheduled civic upheaval once every three months, whether its over holiday lights or city logos, I’m a fool not to partake in the more sublime aspects of the city in order to tolerate it all. So let’s consider this the time to make Spring Resolutions. Who knew it would take such an act of willpower to commit to something as simple as getting out into the sunshine for awhile, escaping into the foothills for an afternoon of solitude, or even the chance to get that glazed -over, red-faced grin that comes from early morning exertion over the pedals of your bicycle?
Well, whatever it takes, right? I’ll just be happy to be able to pull into my garage without guilt, especially when I do it on my bike and not my SUV.
