G-Day 4 – 5K Run for Charity

Share the outdoors with your kids. They will thank you for it (even if they are 40 before they do...)

Share the outdoors with your kids. They will thank you for it (even if they are 40 before they do…)

 

Rather than spend my time alone in the basement, I took the opportunity to go on the 30th Annual Howl On The Hill 5k run with my wife and some kids from her Fit Kids class. I am sad to say there wasn’t much running to be done but spending time with kids and in the cool autumn air was a great experience. It brought back many memories of being a kid out hiking with my Dad in the Yorkshire Moors complaining about how far it was to the next Youth Hostel. In those days we did 15 miles a day at age 12, these kids were complaining about a 5k walk on suburban streets. Can’t blame them, of course, they are products of their environment and I think all kids are, to some degree, wired to whinge a lot of the time. However, they will grow up with their own pleasant memories and as I get older I realize just how lucky I was as a child not to live in a big city and to have parents who cared about and loved my sister and me enough to truck us out to the countryside and make us carry our own backpacks from Youth Hostel to Youth Hostel where we had to help in the cooking, cleaning and general upkeep of the hostel once we got there. Life wasn’t hard by any means and looking back on it I really really loved those weekends away and although I seem to have lost my point along the way here, those memories of my childhood exercising with my Dad are some of the best that I have. Maybe as a surrogate point here we should agree that although fitness and weight loss are incredibly personal things, they are also things that you can share with your kids and maybe give them some memories like I have of times out in the open country with their parents just having fun.

Tony is a great motivator and an awesome specimen but spending time with him instead of your kids is not the idea. The point is to do what you can with him to make sure you are able to do the other fun stuff with them.

Balance, I am a fan…