By Leica R. Carpo, Publisher
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

I COULD never sit still as a child.

I had to be literally strapped into my high chair and force-fed to eat. As I could run and chew at the same time, I did not see the point of sitting down to digest my food. Belonging to a fairly active family, I was perpetually influenced to get involved in one form of physical activity or another since the age of 3.

My dad had me waking up at 6 a.m. for swimming lessons in Wack Wack with Pete San Pedro before I could barely walk. My mother’s crush on Jimmy Connors prompted her to enroll me for tennis lessons with Manila Polo Club’s pro Tom Falcis at age 9. Then one summer, my uncles and aunts got it into their heads that we all needed to learn some “self-defense tactics” so I and my clan of 30+ cousins found ourselves taking Tae Kwan Do lessons three times a week with 7 degree black belter Mr. Hong. From there, I expanded my sports’ repertoire to other fields to include Jane Fonda/Hot Legs aerobics, Billy Blanks’ taebo, Bela Lipat’s Ashtanga and Pye Trinidad’s Bikram yoga, as well as golf, badminton and even boxing. I had become not so much a sports addict but a workout fanatic.

[Read the rest of this entry »]

By Pennie Azarcon Dela Cruz, Executive Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

WHOEVER said that teachers cast a long shadow must have been talking about Mrs. DR, our math and PE teacher from the elementary grades to high school in this small Catholic school tucked in the armpit of Manila.

She was humongous and was probably the template used to cast the bastonera (jail warden) role in B movies. With her perpetual scowl, Clint Eastwood squint and the foreshortened limbs of a seasoned pugilist, Mrs. DR immediately stomped on my outer and inner child the moment she met our Grade 1 class in the school quadrangle and barked orders like we were in boot camp. Forget Private Benjamin’s nemesis and that dour-faced sergeant in the “Police Academy” series. Compared to her, they’re positively cuddly.

Not being particularly coordinated, I easily became my PE teacher’s favorite prey, the slowest and weakest of the herd who was chopped liver the moment she started that day’s calisthenics routine.

[Read the rest of this entry »]

By Ruel S. De Vera, Associate Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

IT sounds so ridiculously easy, getting into shape. Everyone can do it anytime they want, us especially. I considered myself to be in good shape as a teenager, thin as a reed, yes, but also someone who took up swimming and then judo. College was the time when I kept in shape simply by doing what college students do: run around, attempt to get to class on time (note: not always successfully), stay up late and eat on a madly erratic schedule.

Yet the moment I began working, I began gaining weight and soon, I really was a man of broadened horizons. I kept telling myself, I can just start and that will be that, I’ll be buff and cut and chiseled and so on. But the day never seems to come. I compensate, of course, by buying exercise equipment that remains woefully underused. I have rows of clothing deep in my wardrobe that I promise to wear once I get back into shape. And I dream of this diet and that exercise regimen.

Every year, I think that this is the year I’ll do it, the year when people will say, “Wow, you’re in good shape,” rather than “Wow, you really have gained weight.” Of course, it occurs to me now that nothing short of an illness will zap my fatty tissue away. But one never knows.

I believe that the day will come when I finally get tired of huffing and puffing up the stairs and when I can wear shirts that aren’t size L or something similar. Just because it hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean it won’t. One can hope.

Now, where did I put that can of Pringles…

Read the Sunday Inquirer Magazine’s Getting Physical issue on May 11.