What We've Been Up To: A Mountain Workout

Saturday, May 16, 2009

A Mountain Workout

With track season winding down and summer approaching, I am always looking for some way to burn off a few extra calories (lately it seems the caloric intake>output). One of my favorite ways to burn calories is going for a jog. All the area around us is hills so it would be a perfect layout. Unfortunately, up here in the mountains most roads are too narrow and windy to go very far. I do have approximately a mile loop that our house is on but I'd find myself running in circles and I don't do that well. Plus, I don't suppose thered be much tolerance from the little ones when I needed to lock them in a closet until I get home.

The happy compromise has come in the form of taking the kids for a walk. Now, any mother of a 1 or 3 year old knows that their pace leaves something to be desired. I've figured out a great way to resolve this by pulling them in their wagon. They get out and enjoy the sunshine, I get a mile of workout while pulling 70ish pounds of resistance. Isn't it nice to find win-wins?

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all. This is just as true of the man who puts “native” before the hyphen as of the man who puts German or Irish or English or French before the hyphen. Americanism is a matter of the spirit and of the soul. Our allegiance must be purely to the United States. We must unsparingly condemn any man who holds any other allegiance. But if he is heartily and singly loyal to this Republic, then no matter where he was born, he is just as good an American as any one else. The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans, or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality than with the other citizens of the American Republic. The men who do not become Americans and nothing else are hyphenated Americans; and there ought to be no room for them in this country. The man who calls himself an American citizen and who yet shows by his actions that he is primarily the citizen of a foreign land, plays a thoroughly mischievous part in the life of our body politic. He has no place here; and the sooner he returns to the land to which he feels his real heart-allegiance, the better it will be for every good American.
-Theodore Roosevelt