Run for Your Life

Take Exercise'
Ukraine's Emergencies Minister Viktor Baloga has advised the public to take more exercise as a remedy against the cold.
"You need to get up in the morning, take active exercise and work," he was quoted by Ukrainskaya Pravda as telling reporters on Wednesday.
"It hasn't killed anyone yet and only makes a person fitter."His personal advice to keep warm, he added, was to "run 8-10km [5-6 miles] every morning and bathe in cold water, all year round".  From BBC

 My darling, He Who Must Be Obeyed, has told me the story many times over the nearly 60 decades that we have been married.  He tells of going to a country one room schoolhouse when he was a boy in Wyoming.  On a particularly windy and below zero day, he and his sister started out for school on a horse. When they came out of the more sheltered river bottom, up the banks and onto the prairie, the cold was life threatening.  His sister began to cry.  He jumped off of the horse and hanging on to its tail, he ran the rest of the way to school. When they arrived the teacher was nowhere to be seen.  They put the horse in the barn and went into the freezing cold schoolhouse. 


The teacher had a stack of magazines that he treasured.  They made for great fire starter, torn off page by page and twisted tight for makeshift kindling.  Starting a fire in a cold pot bellied stove is serious business.  With a stack of pitch kindling, it is easy if one knows how to set it correctly.  From that point my recollection of the story fades away like a whispy cloud.  Did he find firewood? Did the teacher arrive from Belle Fourche?  Did someone come in a car for him and his sister?  Maybe after warming up they once again mounted the horse and galloped for home. How far away was the school from home?  Five or six miles comes to my mind. 


I could get all the frightening details if he were awake.  I read him to sleep again after lunch.