My neighbor Jim and I slipped our kayaks into the lake, our paddles dipping into the glassy water.  We nudged through the fallen leaves dotting the surface, a scattering of orange and red stars.  The sky, with its mid-fall overcast, reflected mother-of-pearl in the ripples around us.

We moved down stream, around the point, and through several dying pine trees.  During the previous year’s drought, they sprang up on the low-lying spit of sand.  With the rise of the water level, though, they stood off the land like three doomed miniature lighthouses.

Paddling across the lake, we reached the far shore and then turned upstream.  A year prior, when we paddled this same spot, we had to move through a rock garden— large lumpy shoulders that rose above the surface, our plastic boats leaving little blue or red slivers of themselves on the grainy stone.  Now, we floated several feet above the garden, the rocks occasionally rubbing the undersides of our kayaks.

Further upstream, we floated over other areas that I remembered, now washed out by the higher water: the sand bar that spread out like blonde hair, the two boulders that pinched the stream into a setting from The Wind in the Willows, the large outcropping that served as a sheer-faced perch.

The river chattered to itself and us as we paddled further upstream. When the water became too shallow, we left the boats stranded on boulders and waded to the far bank.  Following a trail, we skirted a debris line.  High water the previous month had pushed over the banks, drawing a ragged scrawl of wood and cans and the occasional basketball, some refugee from a backyard that was too close to the water.

We hopped back into the river, stopping to watch a side stream bully its way through a series of pour-overs, ending in three tiny boiling holes, one of which slowly ate at a large boulder in the way.  We set out again, wading up to our chests before emerging on the other side, water sluicing from our wetsuits.

We moved from island to island, working our way over rocks, through pricker bushes, across small rivulets, finally turning back toward our boats perched in the stream.

Wedging myself into my kayak, snapping the spray skirt around the cockpit’s lip, I slipped into the water once again, my boat bobbing like an autumn leaf.  The current pushed me downstream, over and past the rocks, into the deeper section.

With no fanfare, we paddled back to the take out, hauled our boats up the muddy bank, tied them to the truck’s roof.

Some of the best memories are built of small, insignificant details.

Robin Follet lives, teaches, and cartoons in North Carolina.

Dante begins The Inferno by stating,

Halfway along this journey of our life,

I woke in wonder in a sunless wood,

For I had wandered from the narrow way.

Our eponymous, middle-aged narrator has lost his path in life, metaphorically and literally.  To return, he must travel through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven.

By Dante’s reckoning, I’m middle aged, though our culture would assure me that I have a few years left before I wake in a sunless wood, struggle to find the path again, and purchase an expensive red car that can take me from zero to traffic ticket in five seconds.  Yet, I’ve been thinking about how I’m aging and how I want to age.

Supposedly, I should grow older with regret.  If I believe most of the magazine covers, I should mourn my changing body, looking back at my path with anguish, measuring myself against either others or the person I used to be.  Scan the racks of periodicals in the local bookstore; most of the health magazines aimed at men advertise how to get the body of a twenty-two year old model.  Don’t have those sculpted abs?  You’ve definitely lost the way.

But, magazines not withstanding, don’t you feel sorry for the professional athletes?  They have a path too clearly set before them.  Consider Lance Armstrong on a bike, Michael Phelps in the swimming lane, Serena Williams on the court.  Winners all.  But what happens when the path no longer leads to winning times or powerful strokes?  The paths that they followed, so clearly marked, so well measured with golds and accolades and statistics— they end.

I’m lucky; I’ve won few races against either opponents or time.  As a result, my mediocrity as an athlete guarantees that I will never have to leave my meandering trail.  So I don’t mind much anymore that people half my age are faster and stronger.  Because I have continued to run and bike, even when better athletes than I have grown pudgy, have succumbed to the couch, have numbed their minds with too many episodes of Gilmore Girls or Scrubs, have started to live behind themselves, in their past glories.  I plan to win not through talent, but through stubbornness.  I always did prefer distance races over sprints, anyway.

Eventually, we will all lose.  But before then, I’ll keep running and biking and kayaking.  And if I happen to get lost in the woods, that’s okay, because part of the fun of exercise is making the path as you go.

Robin Follet lives, teaches, and cartoons in North Carolina.

I was staring into my closet, glancing past the bike helmet and roller blades and running shoes, when I realized a universal truth: a person who pursues good health is actually pursuing a relationship.

No, I haven’t been snorting powdered sports drink.

Think about the one-night stands you’ve had with some unfortunate exercise.  Remember that day when you went to the gym, lifted weights, realized how good you felt, and then failed to return the free weight’s calls for the next seven months?  Or consider those roller blades gathering dust in your closet.  They loved you after that enjoyable afternoon in the park, swooping along through the golden sunlight, your MP3 player providing just the right atmosphere. (Gosh, that Pat Benatar can sing, can’t she?)  But then you ignored the blades, and they tried to forget you, growing grayer under a blanket of dust.  They missed you.  Yes, you hit them with your best shot.

Conversely, exercise can be a deep, shared experience.  Think of the miles you’ve spent with your running shoes.  Together, you have padded along shaded trails, crossed cracked pavement in the morning sun, splashed like a child through spring puddles, reveling in the mudilicious water.  The shoes have supported you through 5ks and half-marathons, easy workouts and teeth-gritting sprints.  Together, you have established personal bests and survived ill-planned races.  But most importantly, you invested time and effort in your relationship.  Beyond the certificates and medals and cheap plastic water bottles emblazoned with “Arnold’s Donut Pig-Out and 5K Ramble,” you and your shoes developed a bond of trust, and it wasn’t all based on a shared smell.

Unfortunately, given the culture we meander through, our consumer tendencies occasionally infect our relationships.  Can’t spend enough time with your chosen sport?  Throw money at it.  Join an overpriced warehouse containing various treadmills and elipto-cycles and basketball-weightlifting-rowing machines.  Go three times a month, zone out while watching blaring televisions, and try to ignore the large guy beside you grunting through all thirty reps of his fifth set.  Is this the quality time you imagined with your favorite exercise?  Sweat and yet another hour of staring at the television?  That’s not exercise.  That’s just combining couch spudliness with sadomasochism.

We should make a vow to spend more quality time with our exercise.  Too often, we measure our relationship with gritted teeth, counted calories, and miles covered.  But that’s like reducing a love affair to ripped theater tickets, half-empty glasses of wine, and an accountant’s tally of hours spent with Person X.  I want my exercise relationship to contain laughter, support, joy, success, growth, and harmony.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go reconnect with my roller blades.

Robin Follet lives, teaches, and cartoons in North Carolina.

My daughter’s soccer team is having a losing season, the first one in several years.  As one of the co-coaches, I should be irate, at least according to the examples I’ve seen.  Pick a game on television.  Watch the college or professional coaches snarling at their players, the refs, the interviewers, the fans, the mascots, the turf, the weather, the season, the concessions people, the front office, the lousy stadium, the black cat that left dirty footprints across the car that morning. Should a coach seem too calm during a loss, the hair-gelled pundits will crucify him (and it’s usually a him) for being too passionless, for being unable to excite the players, for being too distant.

Tell me these examples don’t filter onto the courts and fields and pitches that our kids scramble across.  I resist, just like I attempt not to use all those horrible sports clichés when I talk to my players (Give 150%?  How?  By ripping off an opponent’s arm and sacrificing it and yourself to the God of Sports?). Unfortunately, because I have been coaching for twelve years at a variety of age and ability levels, I sometimes follow the bad examples.  I have roared at refs, glowered at kids, stormed along sidelines, all in an effort to get that win.

Afterwards, I felt like a moron.  Did I really bellow at that clueless high school kid who wore a hair extension in a game?  (By the way, a hair extension that flaps loose during a tackle looks oddly like a flattened cat).  Did I really throw that soccer ball half way across the field because it bounced into the middle of my players’ game?  Did I really get into a roaring argument with the ref?

The evil coach in me says,

Doesn’t matter.  If you want to be good, you gotta win.  That’s what the kids and parents want, right?  You’re an American, and Americans don’t lose.

When I ignore the voice, though, and watch my players, I learn other lessons.  Specifically, kids rarely play for just the win, the trophy, or the glory.  Instead, if they are a team, they play for each other.  They play for the fun of laughing at the group clown, for the shared groans when another sprint is announced, for pleasure of growing more adept at a sport they chose.  The shared win is the whipped cream to the season; the shared loss, the bittersweet chocolate.

Already, I can hear the critics laughing:

Sounds like a loser making excuses.

But what do we want our kids to learn from the hours of soccer practice and games?  That they should blame others when they don’t score that necessary goal?  Or that their losses highlight both the levels to which they can aspire, and their own areas of challenge?

Losses are painful opportunities, but they are still opportunities.  Too often, we bury those chances in invectives launched at refs, sarcasm aimed at players, excuses offered for our miscues.  I don’t know how many games my daughter’s team will win this season, but I know they will be better players and better kids at the end, even if they win no more games.

I’ll take a well-adjusted kid over a meaningless win anytime.

Robin Follet lives, teaches, and cartoons in North Carolina.

I returned to mountain biking after an extended hiatus, a vacation courtesy of a new job, a growing family, and bike thief.  In my decade absence, however, the biking aficionados complicated the sport.  In college, when I wheeled my Rockhopper to the trails, the regimen was simple: ride up lung-busting hills, ride down sphincter-puckering slopes.  Since then, however, the practitioners of the sport have invented, among other things, the skills section, a mountain biker’s playground complete with skinnies, teeter-totters, and other nefarious wooden devices.

Skinnies are land bridges, thin planks that trail builders set from nowhere to nowhere.  Standing anywhere from three inches to several feet above the ground, they challenge the rider to ride a narrow line; falter from the two-by-six, and you either jump or fall off the edge— onto dirt or mulch, if the trail engineers are kind.   Teeter-totters are…well…teeter-totters.  Aim your bike up the ramp, keep your balance, and either wait for the other side to drop you to the ground, or launch yourself into the ether, using the plank and fulcrum as a launch.

On my first ride after the extended vacation, when I first saw a skinny (and a beginner’s skinny at that), I snorted.

You’ve got to be kidding,

I said to David, my riding partner. He smirked.

Wait till you see what comes next.

He rode it perfectly.  I tumbled off the side within the first two feet.

Practice followed, and if perfection hasn’t, comfort certainly has.  I’ve ridden the skinny numerous times since then; the beginner’s bridge doesn’t raise my pulse, nor does the teeter totter— at least, not in the novice section.

Still, I appreciate the land bridge in a way that I couldn’t several years ago.

(Forgive me, dear reader; in my real life I’m an English teacher, so I tend to see symbols quite often.  Here goes.)

Simply put, the skinny symbolizes balance.  We fear the lurch off the edge, but we ride through the anxiety, eyes focused on the six-inch wide piece of wood in front.  Stay on the board, remain relaxed, move forward.  Nothing else— not the drop to the side, or the teeter in front, or the issues at work— nothing else matters.

All of us have experienced the aura of balance and the tension of crashing.  Most of us know, instinctively, that we have to wave hello at our worries, but then we have to watch the path in front of us.  Yet we are distracted by the drops at the side-the phone calls, e-mail messages, politics at the office, demands and complaints and assertions that pull us off the plank.  And we crash, whether that means spending too much time in the bar or on the computer or in the office, staring at something other than our lives.

Exercise reminds us how to stay on the path.  It is the pure distillation of what we know, but what we need to be reminded of:  ride the skinny, and keep your balance.  It gives you confidence for what comes next, even if it’s a teeter-totter.

Robin Follet lives, teaches, and cartoons in North Carolina.