This is pretty inspiring. (Thanks Merrilee!)
Obama has gone to the gym, for about 90 minutes a day, for at least 48 days in a row. He always has treated exercise less as recreation than requirement, but his devotion has intensified during the past few months.
Right now I’m more like the reporters covering him.
For the small group of reporters tasked with following Obama’s every move, his fitness has become a running joke repeated in the stories they file. They sit at McDonald’s while he exercises in Hawaii. They eat calorie-rich scones while he sweats at Regents Park. One reporter for the Christian Science Monitor, filing his report about one of the president-elect’s gym trips last month, noted: “While Mr. Obama worked at maintaining his lithe look, your pear-shaped pooler spent quality time at a local coffee shop.”
Of course, I’m no longer 22, so I’ve missed years on my commitment to mental fitness and I feel it too!
It’s a schedule he started as a 22-year-old student at Columbia University in New York, and it immediately transformed him. … Physical fitness yielded mental fitness, Obama decided, and the two concepts have been married in his mind ever since.