PLAY!

In the last three days I’ve hiked, canoed, climbed, square-danced, done parkour, poked around in mountain creeks, skim boarded on the shore, “porpoised” in the ocean (more later on this), and just walked about having fun.

These are things I’ve done before (except the square dancing—insanely fun!), most of them done usually with intensity and with a serious bent. But more and more I’ve come around to the idea of playing as the most intense, yet non-serious, activity one can do.

Yeah, I know this is nothing new.

First, I was away on the SC-NC border, up in the mountains at 3100 feet, for a school fieldtrip. Try dealing with 105 thirteen year-olds and you will know what it takes to “Work Out.” Yet, for me, I seemed to build energy the more we did. Away from the classroom and the normal boundaries, I felt more alive.

Now, I got a little beat up on the trip but in a good way. Outdoor stuff is my forté so I felt at home, but having been out of it for a while my muscles were weak. The lesson? It doesn’t matter how much time in the gym you spend, real life activity works you differently. I’ve been living in the Lowcountry and we were up in the mountains so I was huffing and puffing a little.

One thing that really tweaked my fitness was playing around with kids who were starting to get into parkour (check it out). I had been doing stuff like that way back before it was ever had a name. So some kids were jumping off stuff, leaping, bouncing, etc. The mountain air must have charged me up enough to want to show the kids how to do it. I showed them that I could out jump, climb, swing, and bounce all of them. I don’t say this out of arrogance, because by doing that I established credentials that I could use to gain their trust and enthusiasm to try new things and appreciate the outdoors or at least appreciate the spirit of physical daring (parkour is not about the outdoors/the wild but I tried to turn it that way).

Even now, my right shoulder is a little tweaked because of particular move I kept trying to perfect, in which I leapt up a flagstone chimney wall and then rotated outward on my right hand, spinning back towards a further section of the wall with my left hand to land again. I never perfected it but damn it was great.

I came home from the trip on Friday night super tired (trying sleeping in the same cabin as fifteen 13 year boys who keep making fart noises!) and thought I was done for the weekend; however, this morning my wife and I went to the beach, like we always do, and there was no way I could avoid skim-boarding since the conditions were perfect. Like begets like. Once started, I felt the same energy I did in the mountains. Tweaked muscles and schwagged-out brain were banished once I started to skim and spin across the inch thin water. I was better today than I’ve ever been.

I’ve been slowly discovering the stuff I used to do all the time twenty-plus years ago. Somewhere between then and now certain aspects were lost or minimalized. Glad to be back.

Mark Sisson, author of The Primal Blueprint and the Blog Mark’s Daily Apple talks of play as a part of his plan for a healthy and happy life. And Erwan Le Corre of MovNat has a whole movement related to working out in nature, something many of us have been doing for awhile, or used to do back in the day, but didn’t have the foresight or confidence to put out there as a full movement.

Do I have any issues with these guys? Nope. Sisson is right on but could link the play more directly to the other aspects of his plan and Le Corre just needs to lighten up a little on the intensity, just like me (hey Erwan, Boulder’s more fun when you play and party!).

I want to extend the idea of play (for myself really since I know this is already going on). For example, when the Primal Blueprint talks of sprinting every seven to ten days, it is something I can’t disagree with, but I wonder if we couldn’t get those sprints in some other way. I thought of this idea this morning when I was skim-boarding with some intensity for about a half-hour. I realized that I had been sprinting for quite a while, every time I bolted after the board to jump on it. Was it a full fifty-yard sprint? Of course not. The difference? It was a shorter sprint but was then combined with balance and core strength. Most important was that it was fun and on the shore and not isolated like so many exercises are—it wasn’t just exercise, it was life, and it wasn’t just life but great living!

The idea is that one plays first and worries about fitness results second.

All of us need to play first.