Exercise and the artist

Once upon a time, I was a serious runner. I got up extremely early to get in my miles before packing the kids off to school and heading to my studio. My kids remember that I always touted the value of exercise. They claim that I once told them: “if your head was cut off, it would grow back because you were a runner.” They are, of course, full of malarkey, but I certainly believed that running had healing properties.

Then at age 40 I had a miserable bout with cancer. My fitness stood me in great stead, but a year of chemo, radiation and surgery put paid to my running forever. Instead, I started to walk miles every day. Among my happiest memories are the hours my pal Mary and I walked in our suburban neighborhood, working through the issues of our lives.

It turns out that I have a cancer gene. It reappeared in a different form several years later. As with the first time, I had barely recovered from the anesthesia before I was struggling back into my sneakers. But repeated insults to your body take their toll.

My friend Jane, who’s going through a terrible health problem, told me, “I keep wondering if I’ll ever have a stretch of time to regain strength.”

I’ve been there, sister. It takes longer than you hope, but if you persevere, you’ll recover.

We’ve had a stretch of miserable weather here in the northeast. I gauge its impact by the number of people I see along the trail. Recently, it’s been as empty as it was in the dead of winter. Rain, fog, cold, and more rain are disheartening in the pre-dawn hours. The urge to go back to sleep is almost overwhelming.

Yet I don’t. Part of that is habit, and part of that is fear. My aunt, two of my uncles and my grandfather were all dead of heart attacks before they reached my age.

Exercise can reverse physical decline

Last week I wrote about reversing cognitive decline by learning a new skill like drawing. The corollary to that is that you can reverse physical decline with regular exercise. Many studies bear that out. It’s not that exercise is a miracle cure; it’s that our sedentary lifestyle ages us before our time.

At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when the effects of modernity were just beginning to be felt, physician William Buchan wrote, “Of all the causes which conspire to render the life of a man short and miserable, none have greater influence than the want of proper exercise.”

Most of us have no idea how sedentary we are compared to how we were designed, because our whole world has been one of inactivity, generation after generation. We artists spend hours in front of our easels; that’s really no better than spending them in front of a computer.

There’s another good reason to spend time hiking or walking, and that is how it changes your perception of nature and landscape. If you only look at a place from the window of your car, you’re seeing only a fraction of it. This week, I’m watching the ferns slowly unfurl. I know where they are because I walk these same woods every day. Later today, if the skies clear, I’ll go paint near them. I probably won’t paint the ferns themselves, but I will paint the green blush that is starting to-finally!-overtake my world.

My 2024 workshops:

• Painting in Paradise: Rockport, ME, July 8-12, 2024.
• Sea & Sky at Schoodic, August 4-9, 2024.
• Find your authentic voice in plein air: Berkshires, August 12-16, 2024.
• Art and Adventure at Sea: Paint Aboard Schooner American Eagle, September 15-19, 2024.
• Immersive In-Person Workshop: Rockport, ME, October 7-11, 2024.