My Fitness trail introduction

In 1968 I started hanging out with folks from the Baba Sri Chand Ashram after taking Yoga lessons with them at the YMCA in 1967. They did not know I was, at the time, a thirteen year old homeless runaway. In a short time I joined up with an offshoot, who lived in some abandoned shacks in an orange grove, had a small garden, and practiced Yoga and what we now call sustainable living.

I was a skinny kid learning Yoga, Shiatsu and various martial arts during the late sixties and early seventies, in Orlando Florida. In a little while I was teaching, growing organic veggies and had taken over one of the other shacks. Until the cops found me and tried to send me home. I came back but the guys wouldn't let me stay. I lived on the streets taking Judo at the YMCA until I was 18.

As an adult I found a job and a place to live, started taking Aikido and Wing Chun, started college, basically had a life until I was 40 years old.

Then one day I woke up tired. I had been sick, but this was bone deep weariness. I usually woke up in a flash, often actually leaping out of bed with a belly laugh. But my overactive metabolism had crashed, perhaps due to the fever from the previous week, more likely from my years of eating vegetarian but high carb diets. I doubled my exercise, cut more fat from my diet, checked with my chiropractor, my acupuncturist, and my naturopathic doctor - but gained 100 lbs that year anyway. I went from a decent but robust adult weight for a 6'2" muscular and very active man - to a blobby fat man, much faster than I could adjust. I still thought of myself as skinny.

Later I learned how to reduce my weight and restore my activity level with a low carb diet, but some damage had already been done. I will never recover from the neuropathy I don't suppose. But for 18 years or so I have been mostly recovered in other ways. In the last few years I am afraid I did some permanent damage to my ankle and knees, walking too much on old damaged joints. It pretty much stopped me about a year ago and I gave up on my diet in response. This was not good.

Now it's time to change all that. I've started by getting back on my diet, and beginning earlier today I'm reteaching myself Yoga. I haven't really done any actual Yoga for almost 40 years, some MA stretches, but not really Yoga. It's hard to remember the words, but some of the motions are kind of seeped into my bones.

What I plan to do is gradually make a moving routine that combines Yoga, some body weight exercise, and some martial art motions. I have committed to doing one added minute per day, up to 30 minutes. If it goes like I figure, that might be a decent start. So that's where I am at, and that's why I am going to haunt the Fitness-trail at Steemtrail.

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Please try my Future History stories - Enmity

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