I run a whooping forty kilometers a day, do you believe that? “How exactly do you do that, do you go marathon each dawn? “I am asked, “not really the field kind of thing, but on a treadmill of course,” I answer.
Long ago I had a dream, a dream to become the best athlete in Michilina city, I wanted to go home with many medals, so many medals covering my entire body to make mama proud of me, but not unless you have got muscle, you cannot do such a thing without speed bones..
1-Sports Bonanza
As we can clearly see today sports professions are deviating away from their original form, long ago, sporting activities were only the preserve of aesthetics, many things as It evidently shows have changed about it, for instance many sports have become a big business over time, and have been incorporated into our day today lives,
Though the fans do not physically engage in the match, it becomes more of a personal issue to them , they are more emotionally involved than the players in the field, if their team is likely to lose, its they that will hurt(emotionally wrecked) the most.
Sports however boring they may be each person often engage themselves in sports sometimes without noticing, when we take sides in a competition, we are admitting that we have become part of the sport/game though we do not engage in them physically ourselves, support is still an engagement.
2- The Super Athlete.
At the Holy limping stadium, I saw a man who could run faster than a race horse, he amazed the crowds with his strength and speed, the crowds cheered him, a great roar went up from the stadium so loud that it almost burst my eardrum and made my heart sink, he ran so fast that it made the athletes who were competing with him appear as if they were limping.
A fearsome hulk of a man in the midst of a crowd, the world was amazed by his stamina and skills, this is a fellow who can send his dogs to catch a rabbit and runs past them to catch the doe himself even before they reach it, his hunting dogs don’t have to do any work because he can easily catch anything that runs on four legs.
Inside the stadium I saw many more super athletes participating in varied range of games, I saw another strong man in a contest of lifting heavy things, they were throwing very heavy metal objects and some roundish things, the one who threw the farthest was declared the champion. This guy was so strong that he could throw a cow to a distance of more than twenty feet away, he could also put a sack full of maize onto his shoulders and run along the track at a lightning speed, yet nobody else was able to catch him.
There was another athlete who threw a javelin, it flew high into the air before landing on a spectators seat on the other end of the stadium, had the spectator not ducked it on time, it would have sliced right through him, the second time he threw the javelin, it flew out of the stadium up and up above it went into the skies and disappeared into the clouds, it appeared a few minutes later when it fell back onto the field with a goose attached to its sharp end which clearly indicated that the javelin had pierced deep into the unfortunate bird’s breast, I saw two other female gymnasts, one had very soft bones(if she really had any), she rolled herself into a ball and walked around on her arms, “what a soft and tender body she has?” I asked the person sitting next to me, I could have asked her directly if I had the opportunity to do so. She had no bones, she wobbled and coiled her body many times like a worm.
There was another who hanged herself dangerously from a high metal bar, she swings and swings herself round and round the bar, she then let go of the hold (her arms release the bar) which sends her flying high into the air before she grabs another bar some distance away and she repeats the same process again, her moves could cause the spectators to hold their breadths in shock, but you know, since they were being entertained, why should they overreact?, it was like watching an agile monkey jump from one tree branch to another,
Even though there were many excellent athletes in the stadiums, there are those among them that were so brilliant and so greatly outperformed the others that they stood out from all the participants, they became the super athletes, and a source of love and admiration from the crowds. People began to associate them with a particular athletics sport or field event.
I saw in an advert an athlete running so fast across the planet that their clothes and flesh literary melts away leaving only charred bones on track and field. This is the constant image presented to the public of how a real athlete should look and act like.
These are some of the super athletes I saw, I craved very much to be like them, My desire to become a super athlete will remain very strong.
3- one more track
The best way to ensure a daily exercise is to have it attached to your profession or other daily activities in your life, exercise is worth it only when it’s part of something else, when the youth engage in sports, it is part of their enjoyment, a relief from a long days study or work, when employees ride bicycles inside large factory basements, it’s part of their daily chores, having the ability to reach all the corners of the factory floor in time. For people who live very close to their workplace, say less than five miles from work, then walking back and forth from job is an ideal way to economize on transport and also to exercise.
But when you forcefully have to wake up yourself in the morning every weekend to ride a bike across the mountains for the mere sake of exercise, things become a bit challenging, first there are higher chances of one forgetting their daily or weekly schedule since one relies only on self-drive, secondly, there is a great tendency to procrastinate each time the day program becomes more demanding and tiresome, it turns out to be a self-inflicted torture instead of an enjoyable hobby, the longer you continue the harder it is to keep up, the frequencies of exercise becomes less and less till when you feel like quitting. The game becomes more boring than you had begun it earlier on. And the athletes’ efforts begin to appear worthless, how is one hour’s worth of exercise a month going to benefit your health and wellbeing?
Not forgetting that you are the only person doing it in the entire neighborhood or estate, no other team in site to support you or to feel cosy around, it’s kind of awkward situation you often find yourself in, you exercise yourself to breaking point while everyone else around you is calm, relaxed, and going about their daily business, to others you are that crazy old man who runs around town each morning and evening in skin tight pajamas and knocking down pedestrians. A perfect clown and a public nuisance. “We see you running around our house every day, what is it you are chasing that you have never caught?” they ask him.
The most difficult aspect of the exercise is not the physical strain and exhaustion that arises from it but rather from the psychological struggle to maintain schedule/workout, the process becomes so demanding and so painful that a vast majority of those who start end up quitting, only a few straight arrows are left in the system, the people’s will to continue regular exercise will remain strong only if it’s something they enjoy doing or activity that is part of their daily lives which our modern day lifestyles has made nearly impossible.
It is better to join a sports team e.g. swimming or ball game than to run around houses each morning like a greyhound, some people come out of their homes to inquire, saying, “hey you, I think I have seen you run around our homestead each morning, you go round and round our house, sometimes we fear you might be a sorcerer about to cast a spell on us some day, please stop your weird exercises.”
4- going for a walk
Near where I live I know of a lady who never sets her foot on the ground to walk even for a few yards, when she wants to buy her veggies at the grocery store next to the house opposite her home, she first gets into her SUV, drives out of her compound, across the road and into the store, she carefully parks it in the lot before she proceeds to get her treasured goods, and on her return journey she follows the same rigorous procedure,
When she is asked why doesn’t she just walk past across the road from her house to get her desired goods? The distance is so small, it’s only a stone throw away, you can even converse with someone from the other side of the road effectively without having to shout, her reply is that, she does not want to make her shoes dirty, her high heeled golden stilettos are simply too cherished to touch that dusty footpath.
It’s not just about her but also about many others in the neighborhood that have fallen deep into this obsession, people are spending enormous amount of time in their cars as if they have been tied to their seats with an electric belt, why are the people of today so obsessed with cars? People are spending more time in their cars than the hours they spend sleeping.
When my co-workers drive pass bye, they thrust their heads out in a bus and shout these words to me, “why do we see you walking by the roadside to town every day, don’t you have a car?” some even stopped their vehicles on the roadside in an attempt to offer me a lift, but I refused, “it’s not that I have got no car nor because I have got no bus fare, I am doing it merely for exercise, besides that ,the factory is very close to my home, why do I have to burden myself with automobiles when I can just make one step and I am at my workstation?”
Miss Leroy lived in the comfort of her apartment for the last five years, she had this stubborn problem that made her arms ache all the time, she had taken many pills, lots of them yet nothing much has changed, her doctor told her that she will feel okay soon, but she is not seeing that happening, “what’s wrong with my arms?” she asked her sister, “they hurt me all the time,” “maybe it’s because you don’t exercise well enough,” said her sister, “I do the household chores all day while you spend your hours rocking on your chair In the veranda,”
About five hundred meters away from their house was an orphanage which was run by mostly volunteers in the town, miss Leroy wanted to join their support team, she had always wanted to help others out, and more importantly, the half a kilometer walk she will be taking back and forth from her home plus the in-house chores she will be doing for the orphans will boost her health greatly, despite her optimistic thoughts, one thing troubled her greatly, her neighborhood was not that safe, getting out of the house very early in the morning and returning very late in the evening when it is dark isn’t a very wise thing to do, she asks her sister, “do you think it will be safe for me to travel to that home each day?”
“that I don’t know for sure,” replied her sister, “but if you are going to compromise your health for some lame security reasons it’s up to you to decide,” she added, her sister Sharon urged her, saying that, if you were bound to be struck by lightning, then it will get you even in the safety of your home, so please don’t be afraid to go outside to exercise citing security issues.
Those who live near their factories where they work and often framed as dirty by their counterparts may be living a more salubrious life than those who work in sparkling clean offices and drive for hours on to their workplace, they are called poor urchins who clean sooty chimneys, a manual laborer at the construction site, may be having little to no difficulty finding sleep than the supervisor who sits behind a desk all day shouting orders at others, though his job may be a little more risky, it gives him enough exercise to ensures him a good sound sleep in the night. The heavy objects his job demands him to lift keeps his muscles smooth and strong.