Throughout my life I’ve always managed to be fairly active. In spite of the fact that I’m legally blind, have balance problems, low blood sugar, & Oh yeah, did I mention that I had seizures & was heavily doped up on Dilantin & Phenobarbital? Here’s how it all got started.
When I was about 9 or 10 my mom & I were staying with my adopted Aunt & Uncle. Well anyway, I’d be outside playing & I used to sit cross legged on an old gas lid & spin around on it. It was sort of like that Sit & Spin toy that all the kids had. Then Mom & I moved into a house that we shared with a lady named & her daughter. Well, anyway we had a neighbor who lived in back of us (who ended up being my baby-sitter. Well, anyway I would stay with her both before & after school along with a few other kids. Well she used to let us veg. out in front of the TV until one day her family doctor asked her “Are the kids that you’re babysitting outside playing?”
When she told him that we weren’t he said, “Well, they need to be.” So the next day she had us all outside playing which was quite a shock to me. As it turns out I hated it at first, but I grew to love it.
Some time after that when I was in the 4th grade I had a teacher who really enlightened me about athletics. Let me explain. Now, when the rest of the class (mostly consisting of boys) were outside during recess playing athletic sports like soccer I would be by myself playing with my stuffed animals. Until one day my teacher caught me hanging upside down across 2 parallel bars & swinging from them. So the next day he told me that I didn’t need my stuffed animals anymore that what I was doing the previous day was considered to be athletic. I was doing athletics & I didn’t even know it. (It wasn’t until I took gymnastics later & saw it on the Olympics on TV that I understood what the heck he was talking about.
When I was 11 ½ my mom had a boyfriend. He taught me a lot of different things. But the one thing that I remember was on one summer night he took me through the warm-up exercises that I was having trouble with in PE. (You know jumping jacks, push-ups, sit-ups & so on). To this day I think that he had a meeting with my PE teacher & they talked. But I’m glad that he did that. Because I feel that it helped a lot. Also about that same time I was taking Tap, Jazz, Ballet, & Gymnastics lessons with a teacher. This was while I was enrolled in an after school program at a daycare center. Also we’d sometimes play the game called Twister. I swear that was my first introduction into yoga!
When I was 13 my next door neighbor was having a girl who was 18 & overweight start an exercise program which included jogging. I asked her one day if I could try it just for the heck of it. She said “don’t see why not”. So I would do some of the warm-up exercises that I learned in PE & then I would jog laps around the complex. At first I could only do 3. But as I grew more used to it, I found out that I could do more. Also at that same time I used to watch Richard Simmons. Now mind you I wasn’t heavy, but I liked (& still do) his personality & sense of humor. Unfortunately he was on while I was in school. So I would have to wait until the holidays or summer vacation to watch him since there were no VCRs at that time. But when I could watch him & do the exercises with him I had fun. The cool thing now is I have a neighbor who has a whole bunch of Richard Simmons videos & sometimes we’d get together & do them.
When I was 15, I used to watch the program Lilias, Yoga, & You after school & I would try some of the yoga postures just to see if I could do them.
I would say that I could do most of them. Some had to be modified, & there was only a handful that I couldn’t do. But bear in mind I was a lot younger & more limber at that time than I am now.
When I was 16 Mom re-married & we moved from Clearwater to Orlando & eventually we settled in & we had cable TV. One of the channels on that was called Lifetime. On it was a program called It Figures with Charlene Pricket. She had Aerobics with toning programs that had disco music in the background which I thought was really cool since I grew up during that time period. Shortly after that they brought back all of the old Richard Simmons programs to that station. & the cool thing was that Richard would be on at 6PM & Charlene would be on at 6:30PM. So I didn’t have to miss them due to school.
So there you have it my exercise history in a nutshell. & if a poor little blind girl who the doctors & teachers thought that I was mentally challenged could do it you can too!
No comments:
Post a Comment