Jane West's other steed
One of my life goals is to stay in decent shape so I can ride my horses right up until the day I depart this earth. One winter of being really lazy, I'm talking deplorably lazy here, and having developed a rather special relationship with my couch on the evenings and every cold, windy weekend, and I found myself way out of shape and tipping the scale at a place I never thought I'd see.
At first, I went to Jenny Craig, and had them help me to starve myself for six weeks. A very unpleasant time all around, but I lost ten pounds. The thing with Jenny Craig, though, is that they don't talk about exercise. And that's key.
And then I remembered how I used to love to ride my Peugeot cycle when I was in my early twenties. How I'd spin the wheels for miles and miles across rural Ohio, through the soybeans and the corn fields. So I quit JC and went to Target a few months ago and got myself a bike, a pale reflection of that fancy French thing I'd owned when I had a little more extra cash, but a good bike nonetheless.
I stable "The Steed" at my office, leaned up against my bookshelf, and we head out for a ride every day at lunch. There's no easy, flat place to ride in Santa Fe (except my office parking lot), and I thought I was going to die of asphyxiation the first few times out on a couple of those long uphill stretches. But I kept on telling myself that you've got to start somewhere, and that small beginnings are OK.
And now, after a slow start, I am blasting through town on my lunch hour. Cruising through historic downtown past all of the tourists and up into the foothills. I can ride from one side of Santa Fe to the other and still have enough get up and go to actually make it back to my starting point! (That was problematic when starting out.) And I almost always treat myself to a long, delicious downhill coast along the Acequia Madre, the oldest irrigation ditch in town.
I'm still eating what I like to eat, just a little less these days. And I stay off of the scale. I have decided to not torture myself with that every day.
Sunday, I decided to do what I'd been thinking about for the last few days. I got out my pair of favorite old Levis. Size 8. And stepped into them, albeit with some trepidation, in the master bedroom closet. They slid over my calves, over my thighs (where they'd gotten stuck beforehand) and up over my hips to snap with room to spare around my waist (or wherever those mid-rise jeans clasp...).
I've decided-- I'm going to ride a bicycle and my horses for the rest of my life.
My horses tell me that they are very appreciative! While Jane's Thunder might not have uttered a word (and, let's get real here, the action-figure cowgirl is after all ... plastic ... and therefore bullet-proof to the temptations of the flesh, especially freshly baked bread and apple pie), my little appaloosa horse Teyla was starting to give me the evil eye whenever I'd come around with the saddle ...
