One of my favorite gifts that my parents bought me in early childhood was my bike.
I used that bike almost daily until I was nine and they bought me a bigger one.
We had a lot of trails near the house leading to the perimeter of our yard at the edge of the adjacent nature preserve. My bigger bike was a mountain bike made for off road trails and roads, and I definitely put that bike to good use in that nature preserve. There were hundreds of acres in total and I knew the place like the back of my hand by the time I reached high school graduation and was ready to leave the area for college. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to take my bike with me to campus and I stopped getting exercise aside from walking to classes everyday on campus. Don’t get me wrong, my undergraduate school has a huge campus and this walking wasn’t for the faint at heart. Still, I got more exercise riding my bike on those nature trails in high school than I ever got walking to my classes while in undergraduate school. It took me becoming a gym rat in my mid 20s to lose all of the weight I had gained in the years since. Now I don’t go longer than a week in between gym visits, even during months when I’m considerably busy with work commitments of varying kinds. I’m fairly simple and straightforward with my workout sessions. When I needed to lose weight I would shave off calories doing cardio before heading to the weight room for strength training. While I do more strength training these days when I’m at my local fitness center, I also enjoy taking advantage of their yoga classes for flexibility, endurance, and mindfulness.