LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth |
CAMP Fitness: Time to Shift Gears |
by Rick Moore |
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 ourselvesin 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 weeka 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 spaceprivate, quiet, and new. Now, I'm glad to have more free time for all the things I could hardly do over the past five yearslike 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 lawnsit'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. |
LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth, Vol. 12, No. 12, August 23, 2002 |