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Kindness of strangers
04/20/2011 6:01 PM
Last Tuesday was a lovely spring day. I was on my way to a meeting at Age and Opportunity on Stradbrook but decided to walk around the block on River Road to Osborne Street.
Obviously I wasn’t paying that much attention, slipped and fell. Two lovely gentleman stopped their cars and came to help me up. Their concern and kindness really touched me. I’m still amazed at how nice total strangers can be in this city.
I asked them their names. One was Ali, if I remember correctly and unfortunately, I forget the name of the other kind gentleman.
Thank you again.
— Lilianne Barnabé
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Hey, check out the fingers on the pudgy guy!
06/11/2010 4:28 PM
It’s the end of Week 7 of our big fitness challenge and I will attempt, using my massive vocabulary and powerful writing skills, to sum up how I have been doing in terms of exercising and eating over the last week: Bad!
If I were to elaborate on that, I would probably add the following descriptive remarks: Bad! Bad! Bad! Bad!
I think you catch my general drift here. The point I am trying to make, if I am going to be honest here, is that I have been bad.
It wasn’t so bleak at the beginning of the week. I went to the gym. Worked out. Did as many exercises as I could remember, including the ones where you lie backwards on a big blue rubber ball, stretch out so the ball is supporting your head and shoulders, then do presses and flies and curls with hand-weights.
I sweated profusely and felt pretty proud of myself for the rest of the day. The rest of the week, however, was kind of a blur. No time for the gym. Only time to pursue the demanding craft of thinking about professionally amusing things. Don’t thank me; it’s my job.
I tried to sneak in a bit of fitness in the sense that, whenever I left my office cubicle to get coffee, I walked down three flights of stairs to the cafeteria, then back up again.
Also, I’m pretty sure I took my basset hound out for a walk around the block, which counts as a total body workout because his hindquarters are moderately paralyzed by arthritis, which means when I walk him, I have to support his rear end by hoisting him up with a purple U of M faculty of agriculture scarf.
The two of us are thinking about putting out a workout video: Waddling Your Way To Fitness. We will also give diet tips, such as try not to eat things out of the waste-paper basket, and avoid deep-fried food.
I wish I’d remembered that second tip Thursday night at Mona Lisa Ristorante, where I attended a meeting to help organize this year’s Grape Stomp to raise funds for the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. It’s set for Sept. 16, by the way. You really need to come. Anyway, to be polite, it was necessary for me to consume large amounts of pizza, deep-fried mushrooms and deep-fried calamari.
Dieting is important, but manners are not to be sneered at, either. The point here is that Friday morning, I was feeling a tad logy when I dragged my body back to the gym. I was going to try another BodyPump class. This is a class wherein you lift barbells in time to music while an instructor with powerful lungs orders you to "stay in rhythm" or "suck your stomach in." It’s definitely 20 pounds of fun in a 10-pound bag.
But my fellow "fitness bunny," Tracy Mainland, couldn’t make it, so instead of getting pumped to music with a large group of women in Spandex, I forced myself to do every exercise I’d learned from my trainer at GoodLife Fitness, Jacqueline Vincent, known to friend and foe as "The Queen of Pain."
I did this — get ready to be impressed — all by myself. When I’d finished, I was standing around, sweating, huffing and puffing, and waiting for my heart to explode, when "The Queen" caught sight of me.
She came over, smiling, gazed at my sweat-soaked T-shirt and remarked: "Looks good on you, big guy!"
Wracked with guilt, I confessed I’d been bad, bad, bad. Surprisingly, Jacqueline did not squash me like a grape. Instead, she smiled and said: "When you’re working out, you get to fall off the wagon once in a while."
The point is, as she pointed out, you have to climb back on the fitness wagon as soon as possible. She also suggested I might want to pound down a protein shake to drive some of the bad deep-fried toxins out of my still-pudgy body.
So we have something like three weeks to go in our Spring Training challenge. I will try to get to the gym as much as possible, but it’s difficult, because I have to spend a lot of time WRITING about going to the gym, which kind of gets in the way of physically going to the gym.
That is my main physical activity these days — using my fingers to hammer away on a computer keyboard like a heavy metal drummer pounding on his (bad word) drum set. It’s not a total body workout, so it won’t help shrink my midsection.
But don’t get me angry, because my typing fingers are getting so buff I could use them to crack walnuts.
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I’ll raise the bar … if it’s chocolate!
05/28/2010 4:28 PM
Thank you, Winnipeg.
Thank you for helping me stick with our big fitness challenge, Spring Training, which has now passed the halfway point, which I am celebrating via the technique of lying on my living room carpet moaning quietly like a wounded woodland creature.
I could not have made it this far without the help of pretty much everyone in this city. When I started this thing, it never occurred to me that, wherever I went, people I’ve never met (and strangers, too) would do the following:
- Offer me helpful fitness tips;
- Yell at me because I have wandered within 100 yards of a doughnut;
- Compliment my physique by saying: "Looking good, Big Fella!" Or: "HEY, PINHEAD, WAKE UP! THE LIGHT’S BEEN GREEN FOR 20 (BAD WORD) MINUTES!" Mostly that first thing.
I guess people in this city are serious fitness buffs. I have been inundated with emails from readers sharing stories of how they lost (a) 200 pounds; (b) eight inches of unsightly fat across their bellies; and (c) $40,000 to some guy who sent them an email claiming to be a Nigerian prince.
It is deeply touching. Seriously. Especially when I’m at the gym, GoodLife Fitness’s Kenaston Boulevard branch, where I have a nifty three-month membership to use in my battle to no longer look like Jabba The Hutt’s evil twin.
When I’m pumping iron at the gym — and by "pumping iron" I mean "looking at it with an intense gleam in my eye" — I am often approached by fellow gym rats who share their motivational stories.
For example, the other day I was chugging away on the treadmill, watching the Food Network on one of the seven TV screens on the wall, when a friendly and fit guy hopped on the machine beside me.
It turns out that he’s been coming to GoodLife for about a year or so and has lost somewhere in the neighbourhood of 150 pounds, which would be roughly both my legs. He was a pretty motivating guy to spend time with, considering I have basically lost, like, a pound.
The other folks I need to thank are the extremely nice people (and there are a lot of you out there) who either own a company that makes health food bars, work for a company that makes health food bars, know someone who once worked for a company that makes health food bars, or live in the same general area as someone who may at one time have read about someone who made health food bars in their basement.
As I write these words, I am looking at my desk, which is not easy because it is covered roughly three feet deep with free health food bars I have received since we started this challenge about five weeks ago. You think I’m kidding, but I’m not. I have also received a great deal of information about something called "Healthy Chocolate," which, if true, should easily win at least 10 Nobel Prizes.
I also want to make a point of thanking the people I work with, such as our editor and our deputy editor, who kindly took me for coffee the other day. On our way out of the building, I stopped in front of the elevator.
"What do you think you’re doing??" these two senior editors demanded, looking at me the way you’d look at a reasonably intelligent fish.
"I’m waiting for the elevator," is what I told them.
"Uh-uh!" is what they replied, frowning. "We’re taking the stairs, Mr. Fitness Challenge Man!"
So that’s what we did. We walked DOWN three flights, got coffee, then walked back UP three flights. By the time I got back to my cubicle, I was huffing and puffing and ready to pass out in a pool of my own sweat, which seemed to please my editors.
So I’m very thankful to them. And I’m very thankful to you guys, too, for caring about me. But I think, all things considered, I will feel a lot safer if I spend more time hiding out at the gym.
Because they only have two flights of stairs, and their coffee machine is on the ground floor.
P.S. I lied. They don’t have a coffee machine.
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Kindness of strangers04/20/2011 6:01 PM
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Hey, check out the fingers on the pudgy guy!06/11/2010 4:28 PM
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I’ll raise the bar … if it’s chocolate!05/28/2010 4:28 PM
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