Smokerobics!

Digging through some old family photos tonight, I noticed this one of my dad skipping rope and smoking.
Like, at the same time!
By a strange coincidence, I have just finished reading a book entitled The Sickening Mind: Brain, Behaviour, Immunity & Disease.
Chapter 8 is called “Sick at Heart” and it starts with this:
“The connection between smoking and heart disease is particularly striking. Nicotine in cigarrette smoke causes the coronary arteries to constrict and encourages the build-up of plaques and clots. Smoking is the strongest and most clear-cut risk factor for cardiovascular disease. A person who smokes twenty cigarrettes a day triples their risk of coronary heart disease.”
And on the next page, it says “A number of the leading risk factors for heart disease clearly depend on our behaviour. Smoking and physical inactivity are obvious examples.”

Hmmm… smoking and physical inactivity. But… what about smoking and physical activity?
See, what my dad was doing here simply amounts to a really innovative, unique approach to aerobic exercise.
Let’s see, how would we define this? Umm… “rapidly increase the heartrate tenfold while forcing hot smoke directly into the lungs.”
See, Dad was just way ahead of his time is all. People just haven’t been able to quite catch on yet to the uncharted benefits of smoking while exercising. It seems that today this is a very neglected field of research. There’s just no funding whatsoever for the advancement of.... Smokerobics!

But I digress.
Let’s take another look at this picture of Dad “working out.”
A couple of things sort of stand out to me…
Firstly, there is this young kid (my nephew) in a little red jacket, and for all the world, he looks to me like he’s shouting to the cameraman “Look at Grandpa, he drank too much!”
Look at it, it’s obvious that the picture was snapped at the “ank” of the word “drank”!
Secondly, there’s this big huge table. What exactly is a table doing out on the lawn in the first place? And why is it that as I look at that picture I can’t help but think that if Dad continues running forward for even three more seconds he is going to surely snag his left foot with the rope and go careening into that table? Is this not obvious? Is it not almost inevitable? I mean… it’s either this or the barbeque to the right of him… these are the only two options this picture is giving us.
The cameraman would surely have gotten out of the way before either scenario.

On the back of the photo someone has written “1986” meaning that Dad was probably 59 going on 60 when it was taken. I find this very interesting. At 59 years-of-age, my Dad, whose most common words of advice to anyone within earshot was “Don’t do anything even remotely stupid”…this same guy then grabs a rope and starts skipping while smoking a cigarrette!
I stare at the picture. I know he is saying something out of the cigarette-less corner of his mouth.
There he is, frozen in time, his left foot dropping the clutch while he is probably shouting “Don’t try this at home!” Those who knew him know.

But that table.
The barbeque.
It’s all so scary.
We can only cringe, and hope that tragedy will be averted… that no limbs will be severed!

******