One year later, it's harder to stay fit

Summer used to be the time of year when my own general level of fitness reached an annual peak. Most years, our family spends the summer hiking, biking and paddling on the river. When colder weather makes that stop, that's when I start putting on weight and losing fitness.

For five years now, summer's end has been signalled by our annual 100-km charity bike ride from Red Deer to Delburne and back. It sort of celebrated a peak of well-being, a reward for a season of active living.

This year, though I'm still “ready to go” I feel less ready than I've ever been, and I was wondering why.

Then the answer came. It's been a year now, since I stopped riding my bike to work every day.

The latest guidelines from the Canadian Society for Exercise Physiology (they have societies for everything these days, don't they?) call for 30-60 minutes of moderate exercise every day. That's the minimum needed to halt the slow decline in fitness that occurs as we age.

Riding to work provided that for me; everything else I did was icing on the cake, to mix metaphors.

Now, to get the same benefit from the other exercise I have enjoyed over the years, I have to add that much more, to replace the daily “warmup” of my work commute. Suffice it that it's really hard to replace the physical discipline of having to get your sorry butt to the office every day.

This comes not only as our Berry Architecture Wellness Ride approaches this weekend, and that in a few weeks city council will be assessing outcomes of its much-debated pilot project on city cycling.

This also comes with a newly published review of human health and mortality dealing with obesity. Lead author Ryan K. Masters and five other researchers combed through 19 U.S. National Health Interview Surveys taken between 1986 and 2006, and found that previous studies had under-reported the mortality that could be attributed to obesity.

Their findings held true for gender, age and ethnicity. Culling through many thousands of interviews and mortality records, their conclusion is that being obese is about three times more deadly than originally thought.

Obesity — loosely termed as having a Body Mass Index of over 30 — was shown as responsible for 15 per cent of all U.S. deaths. Because obesity is such a major factor in killers like heart disease, stroke and diabetes, it's by far the most deadly condition a person can have.

That's in the U.S., you say, where almost a third of all people qualify under the definition.

But Red Deer doesn't really have a lot to brag about in that regard.

Our annual measures of well-being put obesity rates in our city (at just over 20 per cent) significantly above the national average (just over 18 per cent), even though we are a significantly younger (and presumably more active) demographic than the rest of the country.

Just as around the world, obesity rates in Red Deer have been rising since regular measurements started being taken in 2003. As our collective waistlines have grown — including mine, as I have discovered — so does the threat to our collective health.

I have no intentions of resuming my daily commute — I'd be all dressed up with no place to go.

But it's the end of summer, and all kinds of programs resume in September. Time to check around and find something to replace the discipline of “having to get there” that kept my baseline fitness in place.

Time also to remind our city and its council that the environmental and tax benefits of having a widely-useful and safe bike commuting system can be debated endlessly. Individual cash savings are also real, but vary widely, for a lot of reasons.

But the science is in on the health benefits.

Riding to work every day is worth about five pounds of body mass. Find a BMI calculator online and subtract five pounds off your own weight, to see how just riding to work would change your basic setting. And most likely, projected health outcomes for your later years.

I can feel the difference myself in my own legs, as I push over the hill heading east to Delburne.

There are a lot of factors that influence fitness and health outcomes for a large population. But I can't think of anything (except, I suppose, everyone quitting smoking) that improves public health and wealth like living in a city that supports safe cycling for daily commuters.

The latest science shows that it's more important than we ever realized.