Your body is your vehicle. Keep it tuned.

Suppose when body types were being handed out, we were all in a big car lot, and there was a
lottery. Some of us got a Lexus or a Hummer. The luckiest got a Corvette or even a Ferrari.

But most of us got a Volvo or a Ford Focus or a Volkswagon bug. Or a mini-van. The least fortunate among us got an old Impala with bad brakes.

We're all granted a certain body -- tall or short, muscled or not, powerful or slow, humming or choking -- and it's what we have to get us through life. It's not fair, but it's the way things are.

When I was a kid, I realized soon enough that I was skinny and didn't have the muscle mass my 10-year-old friends had. They were faster and stronger than me, through nothing more than dumb luck. I mean, they hadn't done anything to deserve their better bodies: it was a gift they were given that I wasn't. Go figure.

But that didn't mean I had to surrender. I learned that I could work out with weights and run and try to get myself up to their level. It was a pipe dream, of course: they were genetically too far ahead of me. By whatever happenstance happens in our biological make-ups, they were out of my league from the beginning. I was born into a Chevy Vega while my friend Ronny was driving a Mustang from the beginning. I was beat before the flag to start the race was dropped.

But in early attempts to catch up, before I knew that I couldn't, I was inadvertently keeping my vehicle in the best shape it could be, given what it was. My Vega couldn't keep up with the Mustangs, but it could get me where I wanted to go. And it did, even when I traded it for that mini-van later on. I learned early the value of exercise, meaning keeping my vehicle in shape.

And, lo and behold, something interesting happened as I got older: more than a few of those high-performance vehicles started to break down, as the athletes stopped their sports and started getting fatter, with bad knees and aching joints. In the meantime, my mini-van kept chugging along, as I jogged my two slow miles every morning and did my sit-ups and didn't drink too much beer. (Okay, sometimes I did.)

The point is that you don't choose your body type. But you can make the best of it. If you're given a Taurus, keep it tuned. If you're given a Mercedes, do the same. And if you're given that old Impala with bad brakes, you have your work cut out for you, but you still have to keep it running the best you can. And -- who knows? -- it may outlast those Corvettes and Mustangs.

Treat your body as a machine. A vehicle. It needs maintenance. You don't have to run or lift weights. Just go out and walk. Play tennis. Swim. Anything to keep moving, to keep the parts from seizing up later on.

A Lexus dead at the side of the road looks a lot worse than a Ford Focus cruising by with family inside. Whatever vehicle you were granted -- whatever body -- take care of it, because it's more than likely going to outlast lots of better ones granted, by chance alone, to people who weren't smart enough to take care of what they were given.

Remember: there are more old Volvos on the road than any other car, Ferraris included.