Be lean and mean it

Warning: the following contains a confessional diatribe in which I castigate myself for inviting a cold virus to take me hostage, which it did.

It has been a couple of years since my last confession - and a couple of years since my last cold. I say this, not to brag about how healthy I am (the good ole boys used to say if it's true it ain't braggin' but that's bullshit), but to make the observation that these things aren't random. I brought it on myself. I have sinned, and when one strays from the path of righteousness, clean living, and daily workouts, one pays the price by reaping a harvest of head congestion, runny nose, frequent fog-horn blasts into a soggy handkerchief, and horribly mixed metaphors.

I sowed the seeds of the first cold of the year by spending the time I woulda coulda shoulda been moving around out in the fall weather but instead sat at my desk hunched over an editing project that was due. Make that overdue. I consciously chose to do the sedentary yet profitable task of vigorously moving a pencil around a two-dimensional surface instead of going outside, riding my bike, tai-ing my chi, walking the dog, balancing the internal energy - and instant karma's gonna get you.

And so it did come to pass that my body welcomed the ever-present virus, which made itself at home in the warm, moist cellular environment of my weak, vulnerable mucous membrane, where the virus and its progeny lived a long and healthy one-week lifespan disrupting the normal healthy functioning of my upper respiratory tract, making me blow my nose every hour on the hour. All because I skipped a few workouts. Like I needed further evidence that nobody gets away with anything in this life.

My body (and probably yours) is like a small but complex ecosystem, in which organ systems, like little cell cities, take in nutrients in order to do their work. Some of what they produce is toxic sludge that must be disposed of or it will poison the environment and make the system break down. The thing is, once the organs are conditioned to a certain amount of internal cleansing through daily exercise, fresh air, water, and the occasional habanero pepper, any interruption of that cycle causes a bad reaction. Ergo, if I don't work out, my usually clean system reacts more than one might expect, because it expects the toxic sludge to be gone.

It also happens to be getting colder outside, but that's not why I "caught a cold" - the misnomer that keeps people inside in the winter. On the contrary, my experience is just the opposite: I'm less likely to get sick if I go outside every day, rain or shine, hot or cold, and condition my internal ecosystem to adapt to the external elements. Typically I'm a little chilly (hands, feet, nose) for the first ten minutes, and then the internal furnace kicks in and I warm up.

The warmed-up body, pumping blood and breathing deeply, brings energy to the limbs and releases toxins to the atmosphere (thank you, trees and other flora for taking over the clean-up at this point). Voila! Mobile immune system in action, warding off bad karma by playing outside.

Just for the record, I'm feeling much better now. My message to the universe: wake-up call received, will not skip any more workouts than absolutely necessary, whatever that means, because the margin for error is as thin as the insulating fat layer on my skinny body.