Coach's Corner

When newspapers, magazines, and television aren't spending fantastic amounts of time, money, and natural resources reporting on events that never occur -- we haven't heard much about the end of the world lately -- or overwhelming us with overkill coverage of babies stuck in wells, snowstorms, and girls kicking a ball around a field, they're hounding us about exercise and diet. This is a graphic indication of an aging and decaying civilization. Young people don't spend time thinking about diets and exercise -- 20-year-olds eat, drink, stay out late, and don't get sick. It's always been thus.

When a publication that fancies itself young and hip, such as the Chronicle, starts dedicating its feature section to exercise and diet (Jan. 28), you know with an unambiguous certainty you just felt a demographic shift.

I wasn't invited to contribute to this section, an editorial mistake. Demographically, I'm perfect: literate, middle-aged, fighting the confusing battle of weight-exercise-cookies on the front lines for many years. Adding to my mainstream credibility, I'm not half as crazy as Marion Winik, who did contribute to the exercise issue.

Diet: Upon returning from a scuba diving vacation looking like Porky Pig, I went on my first diet, an early devotee of Dr. Atkins. Since the good doctor has himself been a subject of the above-mentioned media overkill, we needn't go into the details of his diet. But wisely, he hooks the novitiate by appealing to the very base qualities that drove you to pick up the book in the first place: We're pigs. Eat as many heavily marbled steaks and butter-soaked lobsters as you want, advises the doctor. Knock yourself out. Eat till you puke. Just give up the carbos.

It works. I lost 20 lbs. in a few months. But after a lengthy holiday season, it's back. I still put on airs about being on this diet, but it's a lie. The way I see it, all diets are destined to fail for one fundamental reason: They all ask us to give up good things forever -- a modern-day impossibility

In the old days, tall, lean, Wyatt Earp, for example, didn't saunter into the Tombstone drug store and have to pass by a 20-yard-long display of candy. He didn't stroll down aisles upon aisles of Pepsi, cookies, ice cream, and potato chips at the Abilene Safeway. It's a well-known fact Marshal Earp got his drugs from his friend Doc Holliday. When he was hungry he went out and shot a buffalo. Staying thin was not a problem in his days; this is a modern problem. My counsel on a diet is this: Be realistic. Try to dip only four cookies in 2% milk instead of your customary eight in half-&-half. Then convince yourself you've done a good thing ... and indeed you have.

Exercise: Marion posited a good-sounding theory; you can, if you only try, replace whatever compulsion that got you fat in the first place -- drugs, candy, scotch -- with exercise. It won't work. I give Marion six months ... tops. For this reason: Drugs feel good. Candy tastes good. Scotch is good. These are good things. They don't hurt. Exercise does.

Maintenance exercise isn't fun. You might be able to fool yourself for a few months, but it's like a diet: Fundamental, immutable laws apply. Cookies are good, and exercise isn't. Not today, not tomorrow, not next year. Not ever.

Again, the key to long-term success is a realistic view. To wit, running. I've been a steady jogger for 30 years. I hate running. Despise it. My first thought after two steps is how fucking far away the end is. I've never enjoyed a run. The only so-called "runner's high" I've ever felt is this: I'm finished and don't have to think about running for two days. My only expectation: It will end.

A common mistake of the beginning exerciser is setting time and distance goals. The guys with the Star Trek tricorders strapped on their wrist and straps draped across the heart ... these are sad folk. Pity them. For the average person, setting goals is a prescription for failure. Think about it. Meet one goal and set another. Next time you have to run faster and further and faster and further and faster and further until, at best, you become one of those sad, grim, emaciated, driven creatures indigenous to Town Lake. A two-legged rat on a dirt wheel. If this is what you're like ... take up golf. It's equally obsessive but more fun, and you can shop for real expensive clubs and shoes and stuff. This is the road I chose.

A final tip to the novice: Never run around a track. Half of every lap you'll see your car. Your car, alive, whispering seductively, "You've done enough. You're tired. Let's go home." It's a powerful force.

For myself, I'll do almost anything to avoid running. I'll join a midday summer tennis workout, where death is always close by. I'll rationalize that a walk to the corner is really just as good. I'm trying, aren't I? But when all else fails, I lace up the Sauconys and hit the damn trail. Winter, summer, spring, and fall. Week after week, year after year.

Expect nothing. Exercise hurts. Exercise sucks. It won't get better -- ever. It's okay to hate it. It will end. Never wear a watch.

Negativity will pull you through.