Snakes in the Grass


It was a fateful decision to go across that field; I haven’t felt my adrenaline pumping like that in a good while.  I don’t want to exaggerate, but as a city girl I found myself in very unfamiliar and uncertain territory, with the possibility of snakes under every foot fall, and most importantly, my beloved mother behind me following my lead.  “Let’s stroll down the road a bit while they fish” became “Lets turn aside here and find the pond mentioned on that sign”, and the then the fateful “Well, we can see them across this field so let’s cross it to the river’s edge and work our way back that way.” 

I soon found myself in the middle of a swampy field full of grass higher than my head, and a very red-faced senior citizen wearing a skirt and light blue flip flop tennis shoes following close behind me.  In no time we felt that turning back would take even longer than finishing our “short cut”, but it was getting hotter by the minute, and who knew if the snakes would continue to run away from my stick?  There was a slight feeling of doom, kind of like the feeling you get when you go camping and realize that what you brought to eat is all you get.  No helicopter was going to come and rescue us; we were committed whether we liked it or not, and that was not comfortable for urban dwellers like us who are used to options.

To her credit, mom never complained, although I could tell her senses were on high alert and she was creating quite a story in her mind to tell to the ladies back home. I, on the other hand, was wondering if she suspected that I did this on purpose to get her to exercise more vigorously, because lately I’d been saying things like, “Mom, when you walk, do you ever perspire, or feel your heart beating faster to where you wouldn’t want to carry on a conversation?”  The only answer I ever got from her was a little, lady-like twitter.  The scenario I was putting to her is stage 7 out of 10 in a workout intensity scale used by Oprah Winfrey’s former trainer Bob Greene.  He encourages his clients to work up to that level of exertion, and then gradually sustain it longer and longer until they reach 20 minutes of stage 7 or 8 (just a bit more) intensity of training. 

Why do you need intensity?  Because “low intensity exercise doesn’t do much for your metabolism, but moderately high intensity exercise does.” (1)  A higher metabolism allows you to reap the benefits of exercise all day long because it continues to burn calories at a higher rate, even during sedentary activity like sitting in front of a computer.  (Eating breakfast also gets it started earlier!) So basically, one investment of greater effort when exercising multiplies itself exponentially!  Sound good?

Of course you must confer with your doctor before intensifying your workouts, but it is worth stopping to reflect a moment on what you are doing.  Do you sweat, or do you push yourself hard enough sometimes that you don’t want to talk, do you eat breakfast, or do you exercise early in the day?  If not, you may be missing out on an opportunity to become a more efficient calorie burning machine.

But getting back to mom and me, we gave up our plans to get to the river and set our eyes on the less distant road instead, only to find on arrival that we were hemmed in by a barbed wire fence.  But now I believe in angels because we soon found a hole big enough to climb through, and we never stepped on a snake in an hour of walking through rushes. One last embankment to climb up out of the brush and we were surprised by a face to face meeting with my son who had been looking for us.  He swears a snake had just made its way into the bushes when we appeared.  Do you think he was kidding?

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Molly

(1)  Make the Connection :Ten Steps to A Better Body and a Better Life by Bob Greene and Oprah Winfrey, Harpo, Inc, 1996- pg. 134