Last week I confessed to a friend of mine and her boyfriend "I don't care if I have to pay a male sex worker to take me dancing at a gay bar, I will be on a dance floor this New Years!" (He was like "well... good luck with that..." but she knew I was 100% not joking.) Then this happened:
My age starting with a 5 has been a huge issue for me - I finally have employment that allows me to live comfortably after a lifetime of keeping my "career" on the back burner in favor of family and personal projects, but my life is over half way done - so what good does this comfort do? Just after I turned 50 I met a 55 year old knife fighter on the mat who taught me to focus on my strength training and to stop pouting (and since then I have become 20 lbs lighter and 10% stronger):
In 2021 I went to Detroit for a wedding. My wife's health issues that keep her in bed most of the day were acting up, so I took her back to our hotel room and with her blessing headed back out to the dance floor. It wasn't very long before cell phones were out and people were recording me. (Same cellphone recording happened more recently at an event for high school seniors I was chaperoning.) That 2021 dance floor in Detroit was the most fun I have had in decades.
I took a year of ballet in grade school and was a captain of a small ballroom dance team for a year when I was in High School, and when the early 90's changed the dance scene entirely, I would practice in a mirror in a basement to a metronome. Later in my 20's I attended hundreds of dances. Dancing was never a sexual thing for me, but rather a fun way to spend time with friends in a social and healthy activity. But you know my ride-or-die BFF's I used to go dancing with in my teens and 20's? They are old or dead now, mostly from ailments that could have been prevented through cardiovascular exercise!
I haven't been sleeping well latey, partly due to lack of any signficant cardio exercise. When I dance I like to hit the dance floor for about 3 hours straight, 180 minutes... take off 30 minutes for slow dances and water breaks, that's 150 minutes. It says "preferably" above because the American Heart Association has noticed it doesn't actually matter very much if that 150 minutes per week is all at once or in multiple workouts, and I am still going to be doing my martial arts and strength training exercises of course.
The big problem with cardio training is it is highly repetitive and thus more likely to result in injury. Over the last 10 years I have been injured jogging more than once, causing me to miss out on several months of serious training. With casual dancing however you are just doing whatever moves you feel like with the beat of the music setting the pace, making it the safest possible cardiovascular exercise.
I don't do break dancing or dirty dancing, but everything else is on the table: swing, hip hop, EDM, goth, square dancing, Latin, ball room, you name it, I am down! The problem is I am going to have to find people to do this with: maybe I know some people already, maybe I don't. Dancing is literally the only thing I want in my life but don't have, and for the sake of my mental and physical health, I have decided to embrace a new adventure of finding dance in my life again.
