The Best Medicine Not In The Cabinet

via latimes.com

When the New York Times posts on Facebook you know it’s an important subject.

Newspapers in the digital age can’t afford to waste print.

Is it war in the Middle East? Famine in Africa? Economic doom in America?

Is sweating good for you?

It’s all of the above, but the last one is tricky.

• War in the Middle East is all about the nuclear program in Iran, chemical weapons in Syria, and the players supporting each side.

In a wired world, nothing goes unnoticed. Bad guys get worse. Good guys get worse. Conditions get worse. The world sweats the next move.

• Famine in Africa happens when local warlords use relief supplies as their weapon of choice.

It’s not enough to drive around in Toyota trucks with a few machine gunners in the bed. The temporary strongmen are more than happy to starve the citizens until outside forces bend to their wishes. What do they want? A continent sweats the answer.

• After the meltdown of 2008, and Bernie Madoff, how much doom can America expect?

Market forecasters reveal their secrets if you buy their book, take their online classes, or subscribe to their newsletters. More than one suggests guns and ammo as the new debit card.

Imagine the store clerk sweating when they ask, “Debit or credit?” And the customer says, “Smith and Wesson?”

These three issues are more than enough to make you sweat, but The Times goes further.

They ask if workout sweat is good for you, or is a slight glisten more than enough? Do you need a science lesson on sweat? If it’s hot, you sweat. If it’s hot like the Middle East and Africa, you’re not worrying about workout sweat. You’re sweating all day and all night.

Still, is sweat good for you? The more you move, the more you sweat. The heavier you lift, the more you sweat. Good or bad, you sweat.

Think of it like a system shocker when you intentionally overheat for maximum sweat. You’re not eliminating toxins or losing weight when you dress in five layers and bake in a sauna before lifting or cardio workouts. What you’re doing is conditioning your body for extreme conditions, as if you’ll ever find yourself accidentally in a one hundred and eighty degree box.

The sweat question goes deeper with communal sweat. That’s what you get with a gym membership, sweaty neighbors. Some are even kind enough to wipe their sweat off the benches they use.

The baby boomer question, the key inquiry of boomerpdx, is if exercise is as good for you as the relationships in the gym. The camaraderie of shared exertion speaks to the core of the boomer experience.

Whether protest marches, music festivals, or the Vietnam war, boomers made a big effort.

Today they join other like minds in search of fitness. Some workout to live, some hit it to prolong the life they’ve got. You see the lone wolves making the rounds as well as the duos. All of them are in the gym until the end.

In this sanctuary there are no politics, religion, or belief that trumps sweaty effort.

If the Times wanted a real breakdown on sweat they’d send a reporter to the nearest gym to observe workout buddies. The reporter would ask questions like, “How do you coordinate your schedules” and “Who sets the pace?”

If they’re lucky, the reporter would find a gym rat who recently lost their workout partner. They’d hear about a man with massive medical problems who made the gym as much a priority as his doctor appointments.

They’d learn about a man dying with a dead battery in his cell phone so his wife couldn’t call anyone he knew to tell them what happened.

Then he’d write a story about sweat. And loss. And Tony. And Frank.