Lately I've been making an attempt to exercise on a regular basis. It's been going fairly well.
For me, it's hard to motivate myself to exercise for the sake of exercise alone. I think it's a weakness of my personality type; in some areas of my life, it is difficult for me to be self disciplined if I don't see the immediate result of my effort. Something about myself that I'm working on....
Well, in any case, as a result of this, I have found two ways to motivate myself to exercise. The first is to do something that I really enjoy (like road bike with my dad or mountain bike with friends). The other, the subject of this post, is to accomplish something in addition to sweating and burning calories. For example, I've spent several mornings splitting our firewood for this winter by hand. I pop in my headphones with some loud tunes and go to work with my wood maul and sledge hammer. It's actually quite fun. When I'm exercising and accomplishing something, I feel really good about what I'm doing.
So tonight I was out digging away an ugly bank on the side of our house (doing some excavation by hand). While I was breathing heavily, sweating like a pig, and enjoying some Copeland, I started thinking. Some people hire a excavator to come out with heavy machinery and landscape the property... and at the same time buy themselves a treadmill to work out. Most people pay a utility company for fuel/energy to heat their home... and buy a home gym to pump iron.
I think I much prefer my wood mauls, shovels and good music. I'm pretty sure I can come up with enough work to do on our property to keep myself in shape for the next 70 years or so. :-)
