Bear with me, I just got up...

I love summer. I love swimming, I love wearing sandals, and I love the heat. Actually, I don't love the heat itself, but rather the fact that because of the heat so many women wear less around the pool and at the beach than they normally wear under their regular clothes. So, it's not so much the heat I love as the absence of cold. Cold sucks, unless you're a beer. (Sure there's stuff I like about winter, but this blog is about summer, so shut up.)

For me, summer brings with it a fairly drastic upswing in my activity level. This has always been the case, though the delta between my cold-season activity and warm-season activity is far more pronounced than it was when I was younger. Back then I managed to keep fairly active year round. At forty-four, this spring hit me like Deniro in "Awakenings." I stumbled up from the couch, blinking at the increasingly bright days as if struggling to make meaning of my surroundings. And that's pretty close to reality.

After a pretty serious snowboarding injury a couple of years ago I was sidelined for several months. It was physically impossible for me to be active at first. After a couple of months exercise was merely ill-advised from a medical standpoint. Finally, I got to the point where I was cleared to start ramping up my activity level, but somehow my body had lost interest at that point. My metabolism had remained at such a low level for so long that it simply didn't see the point in getting all excited over anything. If there is a physical malady analogous to clinical depression, my body had it for much of 2005 and all of 2006. For all intents and purposes I was hibernating.

Somewhere between our family spring break trip to Orlando and my Y-Princess trip to Camp Sea Gull with my daughter this spring I began to rouse from my coma. These two trips shared key elements that were crucial in waking me. First, they were fun. Secondly, it was physically impossible not to be physically active during the trips. You can't do Disney from the comfort of your couch. Add to that a day snorkeling and swimming with the dolphins at Discovery Cove... well, try dozing under water. As tired as I was by the end of any given day on these kid-focused trips, I realized that if I kept it up they would be the life of me.

So, I'm hell-bent on staying active these days; swimming with the kids and playing Frisbee golf almost daily. I know that over time my heart will thank me for pushing myself, but in the short term I'm only hearing from my knees, shoulders, and lower back; all of whom are steadfastly resolute in their conviction that we should never, ever leave the couch.