Commuting Telecommuter

A while ago Mandarine, who was reading some of my early posts (and flattering me by comparing me to chocolate) came across the post in which I was complaining about working from home, a place where I had easy access to my kitchen full of food. I know. I know. To complain about such a thing when people are starving all over the world seems quite petty, but what I was really doing was worrying that I was going to get fat, which is a concern when one lives in a country that suffers from such high rates of obesity and, thus, unnecessary health problems. We middle class Americans, it seems, have evolved into such spoiled creatures and have been fed such unhealthy food, laden with things like trans fats, all our lives that our natural mechanisms for keeping us from overeating seem to have gone the way of the appendix -- they're useless. Although I've never been fat, I'm not immune to this problem, especially when I know good food is available.

Not too long after I wrote that post about food, I discovered The Shangri La diet, which has managed to dull even my cravings for chocolate a bit (a miracle worthy of the Second Coming), and I quit worrying. Nevertheless, we all know that exercise is as important (if not more important, if recent articles in The New York Times are to be believed) for a healthy body than the food we eat, and advice as to what we need to do has remained far more consistent over the years than all the nutrition fads. I mean, with the exception of telling people that aerobics isn't enough and that some form of strength training and stretching are also important, exercise requirements don't change that much.

Does anyone else hate those nutritionists at the FDA as much as I do? They'll tell you for years and years and years that the most important things to eat are pasta and bread, and then, when everyone has gained two hundred pounds, come back with "Oops, we meant whole grains!" Or you'll read a headline that peanuts are the best thing for you, and just as you're getting ready to race out and buy three cans of Planters dry-roasted, you'll read on to find out they have to be raw and unsalted (blech), and that, oh yeah, because they're high in fat, you should really only eat five a day. But those five a day are really going to change your life! Exercise, on the other hand, remains stable. I can pretty much guarantee that as long as I'm moving and sweating for at least 30 minutes a day, I'm doing what I need to do.

The problem is, as I noted in another one of those early posts: I despise exercise for the sake of exercise. I like to hike. I like to ride a bike (although my bike needs major repairs these days, having been abandoned for years, when I worked in an office and didn't have much time to ride due to my long commute, and had thus joined a gym near the office. I keep saying I must get it fixed -- not being someone who has the patience or ability to do such things as taking apart and putting together bikes the way Hobs can, even with all ten of my fingers uninjured. I've ridden Bob's bike a few times, but it's way too big). I like to swim. Sometimes I like to run, if the terrain is relatively flat, and it's the right temperature. And that's about it. I don't like to play any competitive sports. As a matter of fact, I basically don't like to exercise with other people. And thirty minutes a day is an awful lot of time -- time that can be better spent doing just about anything else.

Then along came Mandarine with his brilliant suggestion. Why not continue to commute to work? Get outside and walk, run, or bike "to and from work" every day. I could map out my own route, and make the commute as long or as short as I wanted. So, because I have plantar fasciitis (a runner's foot injury that takes forever to heal) and can't run, and as noted above, my bike isn't in good working order (although now winter has suddenly hit the Northeast, I'm not sure I'd enjoy biking much right now anyway), I'm walking. I have a twenty-five-minute, one-way commute, which is still less time than I was commuting by car in the old days, and my afternoon commute is wonderful, because Bob and Lady usually join me for that one. This frees up my lunch hour, which I used to spend exercising, for other things, and I'm getting fifty minutes of exercise everyday instead of only thirty. I still do yoga twice a week, so there's my strengthening and stretching settled. And I can listen to books on tape again, something I'd pretty much abandoned since I moved home to work.

I've discovered an added benefit, as well. Since it's winter, and dark practically 24 hours a day, I can't commute to work until 7:00, which gets me there at 7:30. I wake up at 6:00, so this gives me a full hour to write every morning. At the other end, I have to quit working by a certain time in order to get that afternoon commute in while it's light. This means I have a period in which I truly separate my work day from my evenings. Of course, this will change come spring, but I'm hoping in the summer, when the pool's open, I can start "swimming home from work." Since we don't have central air, I can imagine I'm going to be dying to get in the pool by the time 5:00 rolls around.

So, all-and-all, a practice I'd highly recommend for all telecommuters, and one that my dim brain never would've come up with on its own. Who says we bloggers don't benefit in untold ways from each other?


Hans Brinker in a nutshell: (I've decided that as I finish reading the children's and adult's classics I've chosen for 2007, I'll try to summarize them in a few sentences at the end of posts): a gem of a story that was really like two stories in one (Hans's story and a story about a group of boys' adventures in different cities in Holland) and was chock-full of interesting details about Dutch life in the 19th-century, amazing since Mary Mapes Dodge had never been there at the time she wrote it. Also, a little-known fact (or at least I didn't know it, which may not actually make it "little-known"): the "legend" of the Little Dutch Boy who sticks his finger in the dike was completely created by Dodge for this book and has no basis in any Dutch legends.