After the Jog for the Jugs back in October I found myself on the Metro (Montreal's subway) facing two women in their late 20's or so cradling backpacks that were only slightly smaller than they were.

There were sleeping bags and all sorts of camping stuff on the outside of these ginormous backpacks and from their clothes and their footwear it was clear that these two women were serious hikers.

To my surprise, we ended up in line for the same bus. One of the women lived not far from where I live and she was bringing her friend, an Aussie woman she'd met while they were teaching skiing at Banff, out to hike the entire Long Trail. Take a moment to read about the terrain this involves.

I asked if I could heft one of their backpacks. My first try I really underestimated what the pack weighed and I couldn't budge it. I found that if I braced myself very carefully I could just lift one of the packs off the ground. Just. Barely. And these two women were going to hike the entire freakin' Long Trail wearing these packs PLUS food, which they had not yet packed.

The Canadian woman disappeared to answer a call of nature and the Aussie woman was left in line with the two packs. Our bus was called, the doors opened and the line surged forward. The Aussie woman slung on her own backpack and then � and this is the part I will never forget, she picked up the other woman's pack with one hand and carried it to the bus where the driver visibly struggled to wrestle it into the storage bin under the bus.

I joke about being Marn-ra, Warrior Princess and by most conventional standards I'm considered strong and fit, but these women are true warrior princesses. Hey, put an eighty pound backpack on me and tell me that I have to walk nearly 300 miles with it and you will quickly see me turn into Sobbing McSobbypants.

Put another way, in the world of fitness I would be the peon scraping the doggie doo out of the soles of these womens' hiking boots.

Did these women look like the willowy fitness models we see in magazines? Oh, crap, no. By current fashion standards they could stand to lose a few pounds. But even you know what? Current fashion standards are insane.

A lot of time when women talk about getting fit they're talking about weight loss. And hey, it's true that if you're obese you're opening yourself to a buttload of major health issues, everything from heart disease to diabetes.

But here's the deal: fitness models are as freakish as fashion models. Those bodies involve extreme amounts of working out, insanely restrictive diets and most of the women look as if they have silicone implants because they've taken their body fat too low to have enough fat to have natural boobage. A lot of gyms plaster their walls with pictures of these women as if it is some sort of holy grail of fitness.

I think that's crazy talk. So does my trainer and one of the first things she did when she started work at my gym was to take down those fitness model pictures. Healthy and strong. It is not about trying to jam your body into some freakish notion of beauty. Get out there and move briskly for at least 40 minutes every day. Walk, run, swim, jog, skip, kick box, dance�find something you love to do and do it.

Sometimes I worry that when I talk about my own weight loss I'm in some way helping to promote the freakishness, the stupidity that fitness=skinniness. When I started this four years ago I was obese, 34 per cent body fat, with cholesterol and blood sugar numbers that pointed to heart problems and diabetes if I didn't clean up my act. It wasn't about getting skinny, it was about, "Lady, you won't live out your 60's if you don't smarten up."

I know that to most of the zygotes who read the Big Adventure that 60 is stupidly old, one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel, but for me 60 is only 5 � years away. The way time is whizzing by me, that is about five blinks of the eye.

One of the very odd things about coming to athleticism after a lifetime of couch potatohood is that I have the possibility that my best is yet to come. Around me in my gym I have people who are mourning the fact that they can't run as fast as they did in their 20's or lift the weight they did in their 30's.

Meanwhile, I keep setting new personal bests mostly because hey, when you've spent decades of your life doing as little as possible there is no where to go but up. Well, there is the whole dying early from health problems, but I'll ignore that.

Oh yes, I'm proof positive that sloth and procrastination are totally the way to go. Really. I mean it.

--Marn

Mileage on the Marnometer: 1292.92 miles. Done. Now I can log me some of them there Road Runners, eh?

Goal for 2005: 1,250 miles - 2000 kilometers