The following is an excerpt from the book The No Sweat Exercise Plan: Lose Weight, Get Healthy, and Live Longer By Harvey B. Simon, M.D.

Do it for a better body and mind.

Do it for a longer and healthier life.

Do it for yourself.

No stress. No strain. No sweat.

–
Stair-climbing is the best-kept secret in exercise for health. It is a great way to add CME points during the course of daily life, and it will help improve your leg strength and balance as well as your heart and waistline.

By way of example, let me tell you the story of Lewis Ripps. Lew is a trim seventy-two-year-old businessman who runs six and a half miles a day along the hilly Berkshire roads when he is at his Massachusetts vacation home. But he’s in Massachusetts only for most summer and autumn weekends and for occasional weekends during the rest of the year. At home in New Jersey, Lew doesn’t run — nor does he swim, bike, use exercise machines, or walk for health.

Mr. Ripps seems to be a weekend warrior who is breaking all the rules. At any age, sporadic intense exercise is a bad idea, and at age seventy-two, it’s an invitation for disaster. But Lew is quite safe because he stays active the year round — not through any formal exercise program, but by walking stairs. And he does quite a lot of that; in fact, he averages eighteen long, steep flights a day at the New Jersey manufacturing plant he manages.

Coaches, cardiologists, and housewives have long been in on the secrets of stairs. Many football coaches “ask” their players to charge up flight after flight of stadium steps to get in shape, and other competitive athletes put gymnasium stairwells to similar use. In the days before stress testing held sway, doctors would often walk up stairs with patients to check their cardiopulmonary function. Even today, cardiologists tell patients they are fit enough to have sex if they can walk up two or three flights comfortably, and surgeons may clear patients for lung operations if they can manage five or six flights. As for housewives, taking care of a two- or three-story home is one reason American women outlive their husbands by an average of 5.4 years.

What’s so special about stairs? Researchers in Canada answered the question by monitoring seventeen healthy male volunteers with an average age of sixty-four while they walked, lifted weights, or climbed stairs. Stair-climbing was the most demanding. It was twice as taxing as brisk walking on the level and 50 percent harder than walking up a steep incline or lifting weights. And peak exertion was attained much faster by climbing stairs than by walking, which is why nearly everyone huffs and puffs going up stairs, at least until their second wind kicks in after a few flights.

Because stairs are so taxing, only the very young at heart should attempt to charge up long flights. But at a slow, steady pace, stairs can be a health plus for the rest of us. Begin modestly with a flight or two, and then escalate as you improve. Take the stairs whenever you can; if you have a long way to go, walk partway, and then switch to an elevator. Use the railing for balance and security (especially going down), and don’t try the stairs after a heavy meal or if you feel unwell.

Even at a slow pace, you’ll earn CME points two to three times faster climbing stairs than walking briskly on the level. The Harvard Alumni Study found that men who average at least eight flights a day enjoy a 33 percent lower mortality rate than men who are sedentary — and that’s even better than the 22 percent lower death rate men earned by walking 1.3 miles a day. That may be a bit optimistic, but even if you don’t count on just eight flights a day to keep you healthy, you should add stairs to your CME menu at every opportunity.

Want to stay well? Step right up!

Author:
Harvey B. Simon, M.D., is an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, a member of the Health Sciences Faculty at MIT, and the founding editor of Harvard Men’s Health Watch. He is a graduate of Yale College and Harvard Medical School. Since completing his postgraduate training at Massachusetts General Hospital and the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Simon has maintained an active clinical practice at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is the award-winning author of five previous books on health and fitness and received the London Prize for Excellence in Teaching from Harvard and MIT.

Copyright © 2006 President and Fellows of Harvard College

Darwin.
They say he read novels to relax,
But only certain kinds:
nothing that ended unhappily.
If anything like that turned up,
enraged, he flung the book into the fire.

True or not,
I’m ready to believe it.

Scanning in his mind so many times and places,
he’d had enough of dying species,
the triumphs of the strong over the weak,
the endless struggles to survive,
all doomed sooner or later.
He’d earned the right to happy endings,
at least in fiction
with its diminutions.

Hence the indispensable
silver lining,
the lovers reunited, the families reconciled,
the doubts dispelled, fidelity rewarded,
fortunes regained, treasures uncovered,
stiff-necked neighbors mending their ways,
good names restored, greed daunted,
old maids married off to worthy parsons,
troublemakers banished to other hemispheres,
forgers of documents tossed down the stairs,
seducers scurrying to the altar,
orphans sheltered, widows comforted,
pride humbled, wounds healed over,
prodigal sons summoned home,
cups of sorrow thrown into the ocean,
hankies drenched with tears of reconciliation,
general merriment and celebration,
and the dog Fido,
gone astray in the first chapter,
turns up barking gladly
in the last.

Translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh & Stanislaw Barańczak

Translator Notes for Consolation:
Prose can hold everything including poetry,
but in poetry there’s only room for poetry.

So runs Wislawa Szymborska’s gently ironic mock-lament from her poem “Stage Fright” (1986). Her own writing proves time and again, though, that poetry cannot simply hold prose: it can hold it up to scrutiny in ways no novelist could manage. Like the hero of “Consolation,” Szymborska is a great reader—but her choice of material is far more catholic (with a small “c”) than that of the famous naturalist. Happy and unhappy endings alike fall within her purview, as “Consolation” demonstrates. And she takes these endings not only from the Victorian fiction she consumes in Polish translation (she doesn’t read English), but from the guide books, textbooks, mysteries, how-to manuals, histories (natural and otherwise), cookbooks, calendars, and so on, that make up the “non-required reading” she chronicles in the column by that name that has appeared intermittently in various newspapers and magazines over the last few decades. (This series itself met with its own ending—unhappily, at least for me—several years back when Szymborska decided to turn her energies entirely to writing poetry—and, of course, reading.) A great deal of her reading—the majority, I’d guess—is in fact prose, including the prose of Darwin himself, which she uses for her own rather more complicated form of consolation. I’ve said she subjects prose to a kind of scrutiny not available to the prose writers themselves. “Consolation” is a prime example. Why do we humans need narratives to structure our lives both in miniature (the stories we construct and revise in the process of living day to day) and on a global, even cosmic scale, whether by way of religion, science, or some dubious mixture of the two (the Marxist philosophy to which she subscribed briefly in the early fifties)? Darwin, she suggests, used Dickens, Trollope, and their lesser-known contemporaries to compensate for the great evolutionary master plot that apparently did away with the notion of a single, all-encompassing story with a preordained happy ending that invariably placed human beings, Man as Such, in the starring role.

Szymborska herself will happily talk about Anna Karenina, Birds of Poland, or Plots of the Hundred Greatest Operas at great length. But she doesn’t want to discuss her own poetry, not even with her translators. I happened to be working on this particular translation while in Poland, though, and I told her that I loved the poem (even the most modest and reticent poets don’t object to that). I also asked how on earth she’d come up with Fido, since Fido, Rex, or maybe Bowser are the only names that this particular pet could possibly have had. She’d done research, she said. She sent her English-speaking assistant off to read up on the subject, consult the Internet, and so on, until he managed to track down a Victorianist at Oxford or Cambridge who told him that Szymborska had to go with Fido. Another happy ending.

—C.C.

http://www.poetrymagazine.org/magazi…em_177886.html

Love at First Sight

Wislawa Szymborska

Both are convinced
that a sudden surge of emotion bound them together.
Beautiful is such a certainty,
but uncertainty is more beautiful.

Because they didn’t know each other earlier, they suppose that
nothing was happening between them.
What of the streets, stairways and corridors
where they could have passed each other long ago?

I’d like to ask them
whether they remember– perhaps in a revolving door
ever being face to face?
an “excuse me” in a crowd
or a voice “wrong number” in the receiver.
But I know their answer:
no, they don’t remember.

They’d be greatly astonished
to learn that for a long time
chance had been playing with them.

Not yet wholly ready
to transform into fate for them
it approached them, then backed off,
stood in their way
and, suppressing a giggle,
jumped to the side.

There were signs, signals:
but what of it if they were illegible.
Perhaps three years ago,
or last Tuesday
did a certain leaflet fly
from shoulder to shoulder?
There was something lost and picked up.
Who knows but what it was a ball
in the bushes of childhood.

There were doorknobs and bells
on which earlier
touch piled on touch.
Bags beside each other in the luggage room.
Perhaps they had the same dream on a certain night,
suddenly erased after waking.

Every beginning
is but a continuation,
and the book of events
is never more than half open.

translated by Walter Whipple

a pretty a day
(and every fades)
is here and away
(but born are maids
to flower an hour
in all,all)

o yes to flower
until so blithe
a doer a wooer
some limber and lithe
some very fine mower
a tall;tall

some jerry so very
(and nellie and fan)
some handsomest harry
(and sally and nan
they tremble and cower
so pale:pale)

for betty was born
to never say nay
but lucy could learn
and lily could pray
and fewer were shyer
than doll. doll

-ee cummings

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)