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| Lego Batman with Leg Replacement |
Sir Isaac Newton was credited with a number of discoveries. One of these was gravity which was right under everyone's nose but no one thought to give it a name. It was just considered a fact of life. When Physics, of whom Newton is the founder, is mentioned as a science, quite often we think of it as something complicated. It is simply the science of the physical: the interaction of matter and energy. Newton was not just a scientist but a great entrepreneur. He took the obvious, packaged it and sold it.
Any word with a 'y' in the middle of it tends to look complicated and intellectual and when 'ph' replaces 'f' it looks even more unfriendly. Yet physics is fundamental and even more so when we talk about exercise and fitness.
Newton's other discovery was that 'every action has an equal and opposite reaction'. This was somewhat more enlightened than his gravity theory as he really had to think and observe interactions to come up with it. The trouble is that athletes don't seem to take this law of nature into account when they pound the pavements, lift weights or make war with inanimate objects such as very large sandbags.
Driving for a living brings me into contact with an enormous number of people and a large percentage of these have suffered exercise related injuries requiring hospital intervention. Another large percentage have suffered work place injuries. A large number of men, both young and old have had multiple knee replacements mostly because of sports they have played. My job has made me very grateful for my good health, although it wasn't for a long time.
I drove a young woman recently who described herself as an endurance athlete. She was also a busy executive with a husband and young children. I think that even without the athleticism part, she must have endurance both to work and be a mother. She had broken her heel in a silly mishap. I asked her about her knees given the amount of running she did. "Oh, they're fine", she said. I explained that I meant how they would be when she grew older. She really hadn't thought about it.
That's where the law of equal and opposite reaction comes in. Her knee cartilages will deteriorate. She will have put them under unnecessary strain and one day they will complain and refuse to go on. Being the type she is, she will no doubt have them replaced and start over. How we do take modern medicine for granted.
I also drove a man in his
twenties who had played professional Rugby in England. He had had four
knee replacements and could now no longer run, let alone play football.
You must love your sport to let yourself become crippled by it.
I foresee a time in twenty or so years when the twenty to thirty year-olds of today will be part human and part prosthetic. But why do this? What is the point of exercise that degenerates body parts at the expense of supposed fitness? Isn't there a nice medium? If you study nature, the hunters, such as large cats, do short term running and long term lying about and snoozing. They are conserving their energy but remain fit enough to run after prey. Humans could learn a lot from this.
Mind you we don't have to run after our dinner and this poses a conundrum. Perhaps we should open a new type of restaurant that makes us pursue the food in order to eat it. Wouldn't that be fun? I do find, however, that eating straight after exercise gives me indigestion. That's probably why hunting animals have a good sleep after eating. They need all their energy to digest. For example it can take a month for a python to digest a goat so it just lies where it is and looks deformed. Mind you I'd kill for its digestive juices as I have trouble eating anything at all. I eat half a sandwich for my lunch but not all at once. I graze on it at intervals over three hours.
Humans have become lazy eaters. As such we must exercise off the results of our consumption. We buy our food mostly from supermarkets and although these are fraught with danger in the form of small children driving trolleys or running around the aisles, adults who block aisles as they decide on their purchase or elderly men who insist on walking slowly up the centres of aisles and veering this way and that as you try to pass them, this cannot be compared to a jungle. Well, it comes close, but no killing is allowed no matter how much the temptation.
Bicycling is a lot easier on the knees but the danger of sharing the road with cars brings it into the realm of adventure sport. Why bungee jump or parachute from a plane if you can just get on your bike and play war games with the traffic? Some cyclists seem to be at war the moment they take to the treddles. They weave, they tease and compete and, on top of it all, wear lycra beneath which, if you see them in the right light, there is no underwear. You can then have the pleasure of watching two little buttocks rubbing against one another through the mesh as the rider earnestly pushes the envelope to get up a hill.
And one last word about lycra. It is the greatest benefit to exercise ever invented. I found, when I bothered to go to exercise groups in the past, that putting on a lycra garment was so enervating that I really didn't need to exercise afterwards. If I managed to do so, as I stretched one way, the lycra would fight against me like a good exercise partner. It's an exterior muscle and clothing item all in one. Perhaps that's why cyclists wear it; maybe it is doing half of the pushing.
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