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By now, many of you
have heard that David and I have closed our fitness center. Our last day
was August 17th. It’s true. It seems that the new owners of my building
wanted more in rent than I wanted to pay, and other expenses were way up
across-the-board, too.
We explored our options, including
relocating to another town, or combining with one of my friends’
businesses. But those possibilities proved to be too expensive. We listed
the business for sale, but that didn’t work out the way we hoped. It
just started the rumor mill.
So instead, we decided to shift gears and
build our own personal training center at our home. We did most of the
work ourselves—in 100-degree heat. The end result is that we’re nearly
ready to re-open for personal training, but we won’t be offering
memberships anymore. Everything will be by appointment only. We will truly
miss all the great club members who touched our lives, but time moves on,
and we had to move on to something new.
Since there won’t be any more
memberships, we sent our valid members a refund letter this week—a rare
thing in the world of health clubs. When most health clubs close, they
simply leave their members in the lurch! That’s happened several times
in this area over the past few years.
When I talked this over with my personal
training clients, they were completely behind me, and very encouraging to
me. I have even signed up four new clients who were specifically seeking a
more private training environment. It will be a great space—private,
quiet, and new.
Now, I’m glad to have more free time for
all the things I could hardly do over the past five years—like go to the
beach when I want to! My new venture is a lot less time-intensive for me.
Ask anyone with his or her own small business, and they’ll tell you that
the business “owns” them. I learned that over the past five years.
Now, back to my usual column… As I
mentioned before, we were working in extreme conditions, just like
everyone else in this area who’s been working outside this summer. Our
woofy little friend Brian, from Virginia, pitched in to help us one
weekend. We were drenched with sweat, but after a while, you really
don’t realize how much water you’ve lost until you start to get a
headache and a parched throat.
We must have been drinking a gallon of
water each, and we were exhausted. It’s been a very long, hot, dry
summer, not only for us in Delaware, but in other parts of the country as
well. The south is dry, the mountains of the west are dry, and hence those
huge forest fires. We had a friend from Denver in last week who said those
fires got pretty close to where he lives, a very scary situation.
And all this calamity is happening due to
the lack of water, a substance we take for granted. If we had no water,
we’d all be living in the Sahara desert, and that would not be fun. We
have to conserve our precious resources.
Many of us use too much water for our
lawns—it’s only grass! Golf courses and swimming pools use huge
amounts of water, and their numbers are growing rapidly. We wash our cars
too often, and we always seem to let the water run on and on, even as we
brush our teeth. Why would you waste water that you didn’t even use?
I find it interesting that our drought
conditions aren’t solely due to the lack of rain. I’ve read that all
our urban and suburban development in recent years has played a part. The
fact that so much of our landscape has been paved over, and all the
vegetation ripped up, has caused what little rain we get to simply run off
the land or evaporate. It doesn’t get absorbed into the ground as well,
so it doesn’t refill the aquifers. We’re getting less rain, and it’s
actually being used less efficiently than before.
But let’s look at the opposite side of
this problem. What if it were to rain too much? We’re in hurricane
season now, and it’s not impossible for Delaware to be hit by a
hurricane or its remnants. The same factors that make the drought worse
than usual will also make the flooding worse than usual. All that water
will have to go somewhere. Places where it never used to matter if the
nearby pond or creek flooded are now built-up with expensive homes right
to the water’s edge. There could be a lot of soggy carpets.
Water is becoming so scarce that even towns
and states are fighting over it. Many say that they have water rights that
overrule other jurisdictions and have threatened legal action against
other townships. I have a question maybe somebody can answer: why are we
putting in lush, verdant green lawns in the middle of the desert, in
cities such as in Las Vegas? Isn’t that like trying to grow a palm tree
at the North Pole?
We
really do take our most precious natural resource for granted. But
here’s the biggest question of all: If there were no drought and we
didn’t have mandatory restrictions, would we still be willing to
conserve our water?
Rick
Moore is a personal trainer certified by the American Fitness
Professionals & Associates. Visit his club, Rick’s Fitness &
Health, in Milton, Delaware or www.ricksfitness.net,
or call 302-684-3669.
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