Duty to exercise…

For a long time, probably as long as I’ve lived in the United States, I have always felt that an able body had a DUTY to exercise, instead of falling prey to sedentary life, adding pounds to its weight and becominh unable to move swiftly. 

This was in consideration of all of those humans, who because of a handicap, an accident, a sickness, would have loved to exercise as much or even more as we did, but couldn’t, at least to the extent a healthy person would. 

I was reminded of this, yesterday morning as we were on our morning walk and saw that legless man riding by us on a racing handcycle wheelchair. He first was doing laps by us and later on, we caught up with him on a fairly steep section of our course where he was visibly struggling.

We both wondered what had caused his ailment, an accident, a genetic malformation, a sickness? We had no chance to interact with him as he was using the opposite side of the road and was trying very hard to stay ahead of us.

Eventually, he got to the top of the grade and flew down the hill. Once more, we said to each other: “How lucky are we!”