This morning, I read this article about getting fit with your horse. The author detailed how many calories can be burned doing many common horsey activities, and it got me to thinking about some of the many other ways having a horse can improve your fitness level. For example, you can get your heart rate up (cardiovascular exercise) by chasing him around his paddock while trying to catch him (Tank doesn’t help me out here—he usually meets me at the gate); getting excited (or scared) by trying something new on horseback; or riding through a spook. If that doesn’t get your heart rate up, I don’t know what will!

You can also develop a great strength training program with horses. Aside from the obvious hauling of hay or bags of feed, or shoveling manure, there’s always carrying your saddle (especially if it’s a western saddle—those things are heavy!), or attempting to hold up your horse as he leans on you while you clean his feet. Posting a trot and riding without stirrups are excellent exercises for the thigh muscles as well.

Don’t forget the fitness benefits of relaxation. Being around a horse, at least for me, provides a way to lower my blood pressure. Just looking at horses, stroking their soft coats and smelling that warm barn smell makes me feel calmer.

By all rights, I should be a lot thinner than I am after burning all those calories at the barn. (Maybe it has something to do with the chocolate one of my barn buddies gave me…hmm…)

Have you found any unusual ways to get fit?

Pet, friend, therapist, and now personal trainer?

Lots of contemporary poems are anecdotal, a brief narration of some event, and what can make them rise above anecdote is when they manage to convey significance, often as the poem closes. Here is an example of one like that, by Marie Sheppard Williams, who lives in Minneapolis. [Introduction by Ted Kooser.]

Everybody

I stood at a bus corner
one afternoon, waiting
for the #2. An old
guy stood waiting too.
I stared at him. He
caught my stare, grinned,
gap-toothed. Will you
sign my coat? he said.
Held out a pen. He wore
a dirty canvas coat that
had signatures all over
it, hundreds, maybe
thousands.
            I’m trying
to get everybody, he
said.
            I signed. On a
little space on a pocket.
Sometimes I remember:
I am one of everybody.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2006 by Marie Sheppard Williams. Reprinted from “The California Review,” Volume 32, no. 4, by permission of Marie Sheppard Williams and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2009 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.

It all started Friday. I went for a ride on Tank, because we finally got a REAL cold front that dropped our temperatures into the—oh joy!—70s. (I’d skipped my normal Wednesday ride because the heat and humidity were so bad I was extremely cranky, and cranky rider often = cranky horse…something I don’t think any of us wants to see.) Tank and I had a lovely ride, and practiced longer stretches of trotting to build muscle (for both of us) without winding up in a puddle of sweat.

When I got home, I opened all the windows in the house and sat outside on the lanai to read for a bit before dinner.

Saturday, I started the day with three of the loveliest words in the English language: library book sale. So far as I know, this was the first one my local branch has hosted, and though I tried not to get my hopes too high, I was eager to see what they’d have. Danielle at A Work in Progress often has wonderful luck at her library book sales, and I hoped maybe it would rub off on me. The sale was fairly small, and I came home with only three books: Stephen King’s Duma Key (to replace our missing copy—a truly amazing, though creepy, story); Perfectly Imperfect, by Lee Woodruff, a collection of essays about being a wife, mother, daughter and friend; and Sarah’s Key (Tatiana de Rosnay), a book I've had on my TBR list for a while. The lady who checked me out exclaimed, “Oh, this is such a good book,” when she saw it, so I feel that’s a good omen.

Later that day, my husband and I joined another couple for a trip to a little town nearby to browse antiques stores. No one found any treasures to take home, but we enjoyed the beautiful day, and the poking around through others’ interesting and unusual possessions.

We also stopped here:

Friends of ours own this candy store, so we bought an assortment of chocolate to (ahem) support their fledgling business.


And Sunday? Well, Sunday was the best of all. My son and husband went mountain biking, leaving me home alone for most of the day. I filled the hours, which went by like minutes, with reading (the Sunday paper and The Winter Sea), puttering (cleaned off my kitchen desk and the drawers and cabinet surrounding it while watching Eat Pray Love on dvd) and simply chilling out and enjoying the solitude. I also watched one of Laure Ferlita’s class videos, and fooled around trying to figure out what to sketch for the assignment.

My weekend was the perfect blend of activity and relaxation, solitude and togetherness. I especially loved doing something fun with my husband, instead of doing errands or household projects. I hope future weekends will be just as wonderful.

How was your weekend?

All this fun is just exhausting...

What will you do to feed your inner artist?

I take classes with Laure Ferlita...