Sheila: Good morning and welcome to Travels with Sheila here in Saint Anton am Arlberg Austria. I thought I’d talk to you a little bit about health today. I'm 68 years old and belong to the National Institute of Health, Women’s Study that they’ve been working on for well over 15 years. And so, I get a questionnaire and some of the questions is, can you get upright without help? Do you need assistance in going up and down stairs? All these things that I don’t think I even stop to think about in my daily life, as much as I do not want to get out of this very comfy bed with fluffy pillows and a nice warm duvet and go out and exercise, we’re going to only because I hope that the quality of life that exercise has given us fortunately will at least stay with us for a few more years.
I was raised in a generation that women did absolutely nothing and it wasn’t until 1977 that I discovered running, something that I could actually do. My first mile, I felt the euphoria that was just mind-boggling. Not only did I discover I was good at running but that was the marathoning and overachievingly decided, “Well I could run a marathon in four months,” and we did. Both my husband and I ran the Honolulu marathon four months later.
What I've learned from all this is you must exercise. You do not have to do it everyday, you don’t have to do it for long periods of time, and the most important thing for me is putting on something, some kind of exercise gear, whether or not it’s running shoes, anything and getting out and like Nike says, “Just do it”. You’ll never know whether or not you're going to be one of the fortunate ones who is blessed with great health and ability and lives to be 100 years old without doing a darn thing. But for most of us, it does not work that way.
You don’t want to get a little surveys in the mail asking whether or not you can rise from a sitting position without help at the age of 50 or 60, any age. Give yourself a break. To paraphrase one of Abraham Lincolns quotes, “It’s not how long you live, it’s life you manage to squeeze into the amount of years that you do have on earth”. So put on something, you don’t have to do it everyday, give yourself a head start up with good health. [Foreign Language]
Male: If you’ve never exercised and you decide you want to go out and start doing some sort of physical exercise, it doesn’t hurt to contact a physician before you start to make sure all the parts of your body are able to do what you want to try to do.
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