Last July, I spent an evening with my niece, a benefit to me of her missed plane connection from Denver to Indianapolis and a lack of transportation from friends. She was still recovering from a broken neck suffered in an accident that June. Her neck brace held her head stiffly as she curled up in my black pleather office chair; she drank water as I drank beer and listened to her observation about Indiana citizenry. She left southern Indiana for Denver, Colorado a couple of years ago, and has been hiking, skiing and backpacking through the mountains, and attending Bikram yoga classes in between. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been around so many unfit people,” she said.
That conversation came to life in my memory when I saw a bit on the TV program “CBS This Morning” about the top 50 fittest cities and the top 50 unfit cities. According to the American College of Sports Medicine’s 2015 American Fitness Index, Indianapolis was the least fit of the unfit group. I read more expansive coverage of the fitness index in another publication later that morning. We are not doing so well, and Jess noted that, last July.
Before I moved to Irvington, my potential landlord asked my (then) current landlord about my hobbies. She was told that, among other things, “He likes to walk.” (It was pure luck that my potential landlord was able to get a personal reference from the creative director of this publication.) When I lived in St. Louis, my visiting children would grumble when I made them accompany me on my eight-block walk to work. Last year, my two grandchildren complained to their parents that I had made them “WALK!” to the store at the top of the hill. Barring accident or injury, I will walk. In a recent conversation with my sister, I congratulated her on her weight loss, of which she was proud. She laughingly derided me, though, claiming that I was one of those people with a “galloping metabolism,” though she conceded, “you eat healthy, too.” (Even working journalists like my sister will occasionally take liberties with grammar.) When I spent some extended time with her during our mother’s illness, I also walked her neighborhood.
The other publication quoted an investigator for Regenstrief Institute, a health care research organization. Ironically, the investigator implied that a comparison between Indianapolis and Denver (Jess’ new home) was unfair: “We’re not going to get mountains — (and) — oceans,” NiCole Keith was quoted as saying. But Denver has no ocean and the number one city in terms of fitness, Washington D.C., has no mountains. When we have key members of the Indiana Department of Environmental Affairs fighting against imposing more stringent ozone standards on polluters — standards that will help asthmatic children and adults take a better breath — we are not going to get many more fit people on the Indiana byways; we will continue to get “F” and “D” grades from the American Lung Association’s State of the Air Report. And the appellate court is now considering an assault by two bar owners on the Indianapolis ban on smoking in bars, restaurants, bowling alleys and inns. According to statistics compiled by the Centers for Disease Control, one in five deaths in the United States are the result of cigarette smoking, and exposure to second-hand smoke strikes down 42,000 humans each year. (I was a smoker; I stopped on May 9th, 2010.)
We are not going to get fit until we put some effort into the idea. Walk, swim, run, bike, move: Let’s not be unfit.