Long before we humans began to play at recreational runs—scampering about to win finisher medals, not sprinting away from cougars—a simple discipline existed to produce enduring health benefits of a more well-rounded caliber.
That regime was called: doing work all day, every day.
By “work,” I don’t mean staring at some benighted screen, critiquing associates via cell phone, poking at keyboards, or dictating texts or memos for a horde of corporate minions. I speak of doing tough physical labor performed with your very own hands—as well as various other body parts, all the way down to the callouses on your tippytoes.
I’m now on a trek back to that exact discipline, a de rigueur tour of my former blue-collar workout. I can report decent results: over the past three weeks, I slept much better and enjoyed a far sharper appetite. Despite my robust bouts of chowing down, I lost three pounds over the first three days. Then, three more later. Of course, most of my muscles grew a bit stiff and sore at the start. And yep, you bet, I needed to take a nap almost every afternoon.
(Hey y’all, please give this poor ol’ boy a break, as I trot on through my 70s…!)
Won’t deny it took a sizeable dose of will power to leap back into a way I used to work five decades or so ago.
Yet there’s no argument about its benefits. Number one, my pants fit better. Now, it’s not as though my abs had utterly absconded. They still existed way down in there, somewhere—however indiscernible they seemed. If I desired to watch a sixpack appear in my bathroom mirror, I needed to go buy one at a liquor store, then hold it up above the rim of my sink. But after a week of work? All I need do is stand there and tug off my filthy, sweat-stained, paint-spattered shirt.
HOW IT WAS JUST A LIL’ WHILE AGO
Just a few months before this, I stood out on the apron of our concrete driveway, trying to revive bygone skills by building a dozen modular panels out of kiln-dried redwood 2”x2”s, stainless steel staples, screws, plus a tight and feisty coil of chicken wire. A young lady walked up to ask me what the heck I was trying to do.
“Well,” I said, “we’ve got a Granny Smith apple tree over there in the front yard. First few years we had it, squirrels could not suss out what it was, so we enjoyed fresh apples by the dozen. Then they figured an apple is edible. Last year, we harvested nary a one. Now, I’m building a fenced-in exclosure. So we can keep our damn apples. And the squirrels can go back to rooting up buried acorns.”
She gazed at my stash of panels—I was about halfway done with the project. I planned to zip-tie those panels together, against and over a series of metal stakes, in order to shield our young tree from all those avid rodent raiders.
“Y’know, I had to fix our garden gate last week,” she told me. “A hinge broke. I told my husband, but he only shook his head. I tried to locate a handyman to fix it. Nobody would show up for less than a hundred bucks. So, I figured it all out myself. Took a while, but I did.”
“Good on ya.” I approved.
What she did and I was doing were mere rehearsals. But a real deal—my more current ordeal—would arrive soon.
HOW IT WAS A LONG WHILE BACK
A cultural trope has it that blue-collar parents ardently hope for all of their kids to soar ever upward into white collar careers. On a route toward such a congenial destiny, I had once aimed myself. As a youth, I entered a Roman Catholic seminary, seeking to escalate myself into a priestly status. (Boy howdy. Ain’t no collar no whiter—no, nor stiffer than them there bleached rings that deacons and bishops must wear, I’m tellin’ ya! Sort of like a neck manacle. And in quite a few more ways than one.) But after I discerned how a churchly realm truly operated backstage, I fled the sem’ for a university. And from those ivy-walled halls, in due course, I graduated, clutching an honors degree in poetry.
From the outside, my trajectory must’ve looked a bit puzzling. As though I was a dimwit, locked into a poorly thought-out revolt against the sheer notion of practicality…
And straight ahead of me loomed a career for which I appeared to have groomed myself. It seemed I’d spend my life in casual business attire while trying to navigate steps and slides of the spiral stairs of some ivory tower. That vision made me break into a cold sweat. I perceived I was about to transfigure myself into a person whose ultimate achievement would be trying to talk for a living.
Yikes!
But I did manage to wrest myself out of that fate. Thanks in no small part to all the seductive self-mythologizing the Beat Generation had published about their own lives.
I don’t refer to every single member of that bongo-slapping, reefer-puffing, finger-snapping clan, but in the main, to those resolute champions of ordinary American working life: Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac, and most especially, Gary Snyder. In order to fuel their pursuit of adventures along many an urban road and rural trail, these guys took jobs on trains, in auto shops and forests, even signed up to serve as ordinary seamen aboard tramp steamers. Walking that type of walk infused a visceral realism into their talk—and/or writings.
Achieving a similar capacity was what I found myself yearning for, so it’s what I went for. Rode my motorcycle from Florida to California to find a place where I wanted to live, and to adopt a fresh—and far more grounded—style of living. After a zoom through the Mojave Desert on all-nighter from Vegas, I drove up the coastal highway through Big Sur just after sunrise, which turned out to be my clincher; I found myself thoroughly sold on the golden state. Didn’t mean I could slacken my quest, though. Not yet! Since I blew into Frisco with a mere trio of twenties slumped in my poke, putting my feet up was far from an option.
After serving brief gigs as a fair barker and catering truck driver, plus a few other oddments, I joined a carpenters’ union and launched into my apprenticeship with a custom home builder.
Within a year, I was furiously pounding nails, making little pieces of wood out of big ones, pushing wheelbarrows full of “mud” (concrete), walking rafters, and wrangling primitive, worm-drive saws approximately the size and weight of ostler anvils around to job sites. And loving every second of it. I soon earned enough to get an apartment in San Rafael’s canal district with another young apprentice named Pete Hansen. We became trim, muscular, hard-bodied dudes—thanks to our days of hearty labor.
But after paying our rent, we couldn’t afford much beyond cheap, crappy furnishings. Actually, that was fortunate, since whenever we joyously joined in our post-workday, lucha libre wrasslin’ matches, we would smash every single stick of furniture in our pad into wee toothpicks. Then, we’d have to trudge down to our local thrift store to buy fresh victims to sacrifice amid our many bouts of recreational mayhem.
Following a string of construction jobs, I graduated after three years as a qualified journeyman, toting a large box of quality tools whose uses I now grasped in full. Deploying these along with a roster of new skills, I found I could pack away a few decent paychecks in between exploratory stabs at transforming myself into a writer. In other words, I won my way through to a destination that those blue-collar Beats had more-or-less been driving at the whole time.
Besides that, I found another, still more valuable takeaway: a fresh benchmark for overall fitness. I recognized that I’d hit a sublime level, one I intended to maintain, and try to measure up to, for all remaining years of my life.
Like this particular year which I’m trying to inhabit right now, for instance.
FIND A NEED AND FILL IT
During my heyday in the building trade, a half-century ago, it seemed to me that most contractors I knew strove to do just about absolutely every dang thing they could to ensure that each and every job got finished to a homeowner’s utter satisfaction.
But that was then.
Nowadays, those jobbers seem to have turned a mite more persnickety about what they will or won’t take on. God bless ‘em; construction has become a total sellers’ market. So, after I and my wife looked at having a new roof put on our home, the most reasonable contractor with the most reasonable quote also appeared oddly obstinate about refusing to perform some highly relevant chores.
For instance, he wouldn’t try to paint the new fascia boards to match the shade of our new gutters (Colonial Red). If that’s what I wanted, I’d have to hire my own painting subcontractor. He also would not attempt to bolt my existing rafters down to the wall top plates for added earthquake safety, nor would he use galvanized 8d nails to secure the sheathing. “We have our own ways of doing things, it’s the way my crews are used to working, and that’s what our bid is based on,” he told me. “We’re not going to get into trying to do anything any different.”
Well, annoying as it was, I could see that guy’s point, especially about the paint. Being forced to submit to a tear-off and do-over if a customer thought the shades didn’t quite match, well, that seemed to be a surefire recipe for acquiring ulcers. The sole direct route to a solution seemed to be for us to hire a subcontractor at a decent rate, someone I knew well, someone I felt sure could perform those tasks in precisely the manner I wished.
Put all that together, and it looked like the subcontractor would have to be me. It had turned high time to blow dust off my old tools, including that most important one—also, me. Rouse and resurrect the carpenter’s bod’, as it were. Up the game. Emerge from construction retirement, perform some rehirement, and see if I could still waltz to that tune.
THE RULE OF FIVE “P’s”
“Poor planning makes piss-poor performance.”
My first foreman loved to make the above point. So did the second. Plus, all the foremen who came after them. Thus, that lesson poked into me rather deeply, like a 16d sinker that slips into a green, sap-spitting ridge beam when whacked with a framing hammer’s hard second stroke.
Our roofer sent me a truck laden with a dozen 20-foot-long 2x8s and an equal number of 16-footers. I helped his driver unload and stack ‘em; that was my warmup. Next, I sheathed our driveway in drop cloths and turned sawhorses into trestles with some scrap lumber I had lying about. I pried open the first of two gallons I’d bought from our town’s very best paint store (dyed into an exact match for my tin sample of Colonial Red rain gutter). Then, I got busy.
There’s a right way and a wrong way to use a shovel. A wrong way wears you out, while not getting the job done. The same is true of a hammer, a saw, and a paintbrush or a roller. There are techniques for letting just the right amount of paint soak into the fibers, for starting in the middle of a board so that nothing begins to drip off the ends, for using the brush to turn other random drips into compliant streaks, and for keeping a roller or brush from drying out as you switch between tools—wrap the thing up in a damp rag.
I won’t go into all the various vagaries of wrist and arm motion, but I shall invoke a few more of my rulebook’s mighty “P’s.” A huge one is Pacing. It’s what enables Persistence. You can’t work all day if you don’t pace yourself. The ancient Romans used to say, “festina lente,” meaning: make haste slowly. If you ever try to run a marathon, you’ll find your best pal in this endeavor will be your wristwatch; select your ideal pace per mile, then stick with it. So it is with any endurance activity, including the painting of boards. In this case, the speed at which the paint dries helps you devise and measure your own pace. To rush that? Simply makes for a mess.
Think of yourself as an oenologist, but one who happens to work with stickier fluids. “We will turn no board before its time…”
DARE AN OLD MAN TO TRY A TRAPEZE
So, that’s about it. To lose weight and stay fit, try working.
Doesn’t sound like this notion should arrive as too much of a shock, though to some, it might. There’s a horde of folks who fight to stave off the decreptitudes of age by finding the right pills, coolest gym membership, workout devices, diet supplements, hormone treatments, or some combo thereof. They plan to go mano-a-mano with entropy in about the same way that conquistador Ponce de León did, as he hacked his way through a bug-infested jungle to discover a fabled Fountain of Youth, not realizing that the tramping and hacking itself actually happened to be the solution for which he was searching.
When researchers look at the healthiest and longest-lived people on our globe, they tend to locate individuals who eat simple but well-rounded diets, who lack the opportunity to gorge themselves or over-indulge in anything, a people whose remote and rural environment has remained relatively pristine, and whose lifestyles consist of staying physically active hour after hour and day after day.
And right there’s your best role model. But, oh no, instead, we think we need to devise or seek out remedies that appear much more magical, far less ordinary.
Okay then, I’ll offer you a little one: try using a chin-up bar. I built one that hangs from the rafters in our garage. I put it high enough so that when I’m on it, I can barely touch the floor with my toes. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve begun using that simple device on a daily basis. My theory is that we’ve descended from a long line of swingers—which is to say, brachiating primates, which is to say, tree climbers who love to traipse through a forest, moving from branch to vine and vine to branch while mostly using their arms. You know, like spider monkeys. Or Tarzan, or Cheeta, for that matter. Mastery of similar motions seems quite good for us, and stimulates assets found deep in our DNA.
What I’ve discovered as I perform more and more chin-ups (with palms of my hands both facing forward and back) is that pains and stiffness in my shoulder joints have all gone away, and as I allow myself to dangle, lumbar back pangs seem to vanish as well. I’ve added vertical sit-ups (raising knees to waist level). I’ve gone from struggling to reach 20 reps with being able to attain 80 in one set. That really seems to work my torso, inside and out, with a surprising benefit: my digestion has improved greatly. The inner anaconda seems much happier when it can stretch out and slither about.
During the final roof construction, after I climb up onto the rafters and crawl around to install those bolts, my limbs and ligaments should get every chance they want to move and stretch. Possibly, a tad more.
That chin-up bar is my lil’ fitness “secret” to explore. However, the truly big fitness trick remains that very open secret: just move. Don’t hire people for every chore. Clean your own house, do your own yardwork. Try performing as many tasks as possible on your own hook! Live a life of motion.