Tuesday, December 13, 2011

It's Not Always Easy to Do the Healthy Thing

Inspired by a recent article about former golfing great Gary Player, I had decided to walk the ten flights of stairs to my office this morning.  The Wall St. Journal article had cheekily indicated that Mr. Player was "more than 50 years old."  Being a mere 5 years above that limit, I determined that I could take inspiration from Mr. Player, who was a good 20+ years above fifty!  Among the items mentioned in his training regimen, he admonished the readers to take the stairs, even if they were on the 10th floor.  Being on the 10th floor myself, I realized that he must be talking to ME (after all, everything is about ME)!

Armed with this new-found resolve, I zoomed past the security barriers in my office lobby and searched among the elevator banks for the stairs.  Not seeing any (another sign of impending old age - the inability to find what you're looking for!), I asked the security guard who helpfully informed me that there were no stairs to be found.  I protested that there must be stairs so that one could vacate the building in an emergency.  Under the modern architectural concepts that guided the construction of this building, he reassured me (although not in those words) that there are stairs to come down to get out of the building, but no stairs to go up.  I'm not quite sure how that would work - doesn't that violate some laws of physics: you can go down but not up; you can check in but you can never check out, etc.?

I guess that idea that some nutjob would try to take the stairs to his/her office rather than the elevator was not a very high priority for the designers of the building.  Resignedly, I took the elevator to my floor and noticed that the elevator vestibule did not have any signs indicating a nearby staircase.  I'll check out the stair situation later today - the saga continues!

By the way, I'm less excited about one of Gary Player's other health-oriented exhortations - giving up meat.  Everyone who does so seems to indicate that they feel better, have more energy, and so on, but it certainly does not sound like very much fun.  Maybe I'll try to think of it, not so much as giving up meat, but as eating more vegetables, which doesn't sound quite so ascetic. More self-deception at work!