Back in 1993, when I was in my mid-twenties, my skinny days were ending. After spending my entire youth in the bottom quartile in body weight for my age, my metabolism slowed. Rather than adjust my diet, I opted to turn on the television.

No, that wasn’t so I could lounge, but so that I could exercise. I tuned in the Lifetime cable channel. It was geared toward women, but I never suffered from fragile masculinity, and I took advantage of how at 7 a.m. each morning it offered two successive aerobics workouts: Cynthia Kereluk’s Everyday Workout for thirty minutes followed by Denise Austin’s Daily Workout.

I tried each of them and preferred Kereluk’s. A former Miss Canada, she had been a teacher and aerobics instructor, and I appreciated her stream of advice on proper form, why a particular exercise was helpful, how to avoid strain and injury, etc.

She was then doing her eighth year of shows produced up in Canada, which always had the format of a brief warmup and stretch, about ten to twelve minutes of cardiovascular aerobics, about five minutes concentrating on toning a particular part of the body, and a cool-down. The segments were divided up by commercials.

At the end of each cardiovascular segment, she had you take your pulse for ten seconds and compare it to a Heart Rate Target Zone chart.

Often a segment would show two levels, a more intense and a less intense one, with her demonstrating the second level via a picture-in-picture overlay. It wasn’t long after starting the routines that I graduated to the more intense level, and I appreciated how the exercises not only kept me from gaining too much weight but also made me feel better all day. I have now been doing aerobics each weekday morning with her for 32 years and counting.

I was never any sort of athlete, and the only time I’d been in a paid gym was in my teen years when I went with my girlfriend to one of the International Fitness Centers in Oklahoma City. She was a swimmer, twirler, and ballet dancer who worked out there, while I was a skinny kid who could eat whatever he liked without gaining weight, always hated physical education classes, and had no interest in joining a gym.

In my early teenage years, my father had gifted me some vintage weights, but I found weightlifting intensely boring. Years later, as an underpaid Oklahoma schoolteacher, I still had no interest in investing in a gym membership nor in making free use of the school weight room. However, I was willing to do aerobics on workday mornings before school once I captured some shows onto videotape.

I used my videocassette recorder to capture 10 to 12 episodes, in Extended Play mode, onto each tape, accumulating a total of 33 episodes in 1993. I used them each weekday morning, and in 1995 I recorded 55 more episodes, including the 700th episode of Kereluk’s show, which celebrated its 10th year anniversary.

I intended to capture some more episodes in 1996, but her show didn’t air. It reappeared in 1997 after she launched her own production, having been dropped by her station in Canada. I recorded 60 more shows, but after that I never caught the show again, although the internet reports that she kept on producing content until the year 2000. The 148 episodes I had on tape were sufficient for my needs, which I could cycle through for over half a year before repeating.

The Exercise Machine

Eventually I recognized the need for some weight-training. I wanted to exercise at home, but there I wouldn’t have a spotter, so instead of free weights I decided to buy an exercise machine. I didn’t want to spend the money on something pricey like a Soloflex, so I bought a Total Gym 1500.

It had a sliding board, pulleys, and cables with various exercises. My body weight served as the load, and I used it primarily to improve my upper body strength. I used it enough to wear out a couple of sets of pulleys, but I eventually got rid of it after aggravating my lower back and shoulders. All the while, I kept on doing my aerobics each morning.

Push-Ups and Dumbbells

Nowadays I deviate from the Everyday Workout toning segments with my own upper body work twice each week. On Wednesdays, I substitute three sets of 10 slow repetitions of standard plank push-ups. On Fridays, I use low-weight dumbbells in three sets of 10 repetitions of curls, rows, raises, and extensions.

After turning 40, I noticed that I was again gaining weight despite the weekday morning aerobics. My cholesterol levels also weren’t good, so I finally tried modifying my diet.

Dieting

For a year I scrupulously avoided fatty foods, no longer indulging in pizza, hamburgers, or queso dip. I ate more fish, nuts, and vegetables, dealt with hunger pangs with a nightly small bag of low-calorie popcorn, and started drinking Coca-Cola Zero instead of The Real Thing. Over the course of a year, my body mass index (BMI) fell from 26 to 23, but I wasn’t happy and my cholesterol was still unacceptable.

So I went on Atorvastatin and gave up on the restricted diet, although I continued to drink Coca-Cola Cherry Zero or added grenadine to Coke Zero whenever Cherry Zero wasn’t available. I remember how gross my first bite of pizza tasted after a year without it, but I quickly readjusted! I knew, however, that if I didn’t exercise more, I’d eventually have a BMI of 30 or more, with the health risks associated with obesity.

Day Hiking

So I took up day hiking. From 2009 to 2012, I hiked over 1,000 miles on trails across seven different states, and I hiked anywhere from 25 to 50 days each year from 2009 to 2015.

I originally relied on audiobooks for my solo travels and hikes, listening to tapes of Ellis Peters and Elizabeth Peters, which were pseudonyms for Edith Pargeter and Barbara Mertz, which I checked out from the Tulsa Public Library. I also purchased numerous Great Courses from The Teaching Company. Eventually technology allowed me to shift to listening to Audible books with my smartphone, and I listened to Ken Follett’s Kingsbridge series and all of the works of Agatha Christie.

By 2013, when Wendy and I began dating, I had run out of novel trails within driving range. I shared the best trails with her in the years before our marriage in 2016, but I was no longer out hiking every weekend. In 2017 I became a district administrator, and that led to a precipitous decline in my hiking on out-of-town trails, with me instead walking on the Pathfinder Parkway in town.

Wendy and I still enjoyed some hikes on our vacations, but the COVID-19 pandemic curtailed our trips from March 2020 through May 2021. During that time, we did hike on the Elk River Trail an hour’s drive north and tried to hike at Osage Hills, which is a half-hour drive to the west. I had long walked and mapped its various trails. However, at that time there were many other folks also seeking a weekend escape, and Wendy and I ended up walking together some in our neighborhood.

Hypertension

In recent years I have mostly just walked on the Pathfinder on weekends, at sunrise in the summer and mid-afternoon in winter. The reduction in walking is one of the reasons my BMI has crept upward. It is still below 29, but stress, genetics, and my diet have now led to me taking three different daily medications to keep my blood pressure under control. That is one of several reasons for my planned retirement in June 2026.

My hypertension medications and aging joints also mean that I can now barely make it into the Everyday Workout Heart Rate Target Zone. I also had to indicate in my Apple Watch Health app that I was on a Beta blocker so it would adjust its own algorithms accordingly and stop warning me about my low heart rate.

Retiring My Videotapes

I still do my aerobics every weekday morning, and until this year I was still cycling through the 13 videotapes I recorded from 1993 to 1997. Wendy had digitized them for me back when we were dating, but I had misplaced those files. I’ve now digitized them again using a converter dongle and the OBS Studio. I used Microsoft Clipchamp to edit the videos, taking the time to excise the decades-old commercials and replace them with a generic 60-second countdown clip.

I had to connect the VCR to a computer for the digitization, and rather than monkey with a laptop in the living room I pulled my 2001 VCR out of the media center. The time-consuming digitization process could have meant over a month without my morning aerobics, but I wasn’t about to do that.

Years ago, I couldn’t find hardly any of the hundreds of episodes of Everyday Workout on YouTube, but a search this year revealed several dozen. Funly enough, they were from her early years, which I had never seen. So for weeks I played poorly synced episodes from the 1980s that someone had uploaded. She sounds just the same, but there aren’t any commercials and her cardiovascular workouts were pretty intense back then.

Since I’m 35 years older than she was at the time of recording, I usually do something in between the more and less intense levels she was demonstrating, as my knees don’t tolerate me bouncing around like a 25-year-old.

I have long used Shokz OpenRun/AfterShokz Aeropex bone conduction headphones with my iPad around the house, but when I use AirPlay to mirror the iPad to the Apple TV to show the aerobics videos on our television, the television becomes the source of the audio signal. I grew tired of fumbling through menus to change the headphone Bluetooth pairing from the iPad to the TV and back each morning. So I bought a second set of headphones and now have one always paired to the iPad and the other always paired to the television.

That has worked well enough that I will now use my digitized videos for the workouts once I’ve run through the older ones on YouTube. I respect copyright too much to upload my 148 episodes, but I have them available locally. So I didn’t shove the old VCR back into the media center, but instead I finally stored it after decades of near-daily use.

Next Steps

My own retirement will come in June 2026, and that will reduce my stress and allow me to take more walks and hikes. Lifestyle Interventions and Independence for Elders recommends:

•   At least 150 minutes per week of walking or other moderate intensity exercise

•   Resistance training with weights or machines two or three times a week, but not two days in a row

•   Stretching and other activities that improve flexibility and balance every day

I look forward to not only walking more often on the Pathfinder Parkway but also returning to the trails at Osage Hills and Elk City. I plan to take more advantage of the Bartlesville Trails at Lake Hudson and, since Wendy and I are members, the three trails at Woolaroc.

Down south I could walk at Oxley Nature Center, and while I’m disappointed that ecological damage and vandalism have restricted Redbud Valley to limited tours, there are the Keystone Ancient Forest and Turkey Mountain, and I might buy a Member Plus One plan for the Tulsa Botanic Garden.

I still enjoy listening to Audible, and I always have an audiobook underway along with an e-book on my Kindle. In recent years I have been listening to works by Mary Roberts Rinehart and P.G. Wodehouse, and I’ve downloaded a few of the early works of Erle Stanley Gardner and Ross Macdonald as additional series to sample.

I still plan to do my weekday Everyday Workout sessions as well. They’ve served me well for over thirty years, and if I’m lucky, they’ll help me stay fit for a few more decades.