Some weeks before the New Year my family introduced the topic of exercising for a healthy heart. Challenged, I managed 50 skips in the dining room with a borrowed rope. I stopped because I was out of breath. We used to love skipping as children, I was reminded. I also loved stilts, roller skating and reaching 100 on a pogo stick even though this latter activity gave me blisters on the palms of my hands.
And now I have turned 64. I came home with the skipping rope on loan and chose two places to skip. The first is the patio where I face the blackcurrant bushes by the wall and the snowdrops that are emerging at their bases. Every day that I skip I can see that the snowdrops have grown by small amounts. And every day I aim to add five or more to each set. I started with three sets of 50 interspersed with some simple stretching exercises and this seems to be progressing well.
On cold and rainy days I skip in the garage in a space kindly cleared by my husband. This does not afford quite as inspiring a view as the patio. In the foreground to the right are four bins -glass and tins, paper and cardboard, non-recyclables and garden waste and to my left various garden ladders, old painting garments and some of the stuff that finds a resting place in the garage on the way to the council tip.
As I count I focus my attention down the garden along the line of fruit bushes, or look in detail at a fallen leaf on our garage floor and keep the rope turning. I have never wanted to jog, a long-legged cousin took me and once was enough, but as I keep skipping I wonder if this is what runners sense challenging the reluctant muscles, feeling the slow improvement, observing the ever changing view.
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