Going to radio calisthenics gave me friends across a generation gap of decades — people in their seventies and eighties. Meeting these friends is exactly why radio calisthenics became something I look forward to every day.

The record of a motorsport woman driving a life: the challenge to 14,000 km, Peking to Paris
03.07.2022
Community work? Young people, keep the morning exercises going
/radio-calisthenics
By a small accident I started joining the morning radio calisthenics at the local park, and the other day I was finally certified as an instructor recognised by the National Radio Calisthenics Federation! I never knew radio calisthenics had a qualification for it — but going every day with a smile, one of the long-time local members spoke to me, and it started with them giving me the uniform for it. Radio calisthenics apparently has around 90 years of history behind it, and most of the people active in this area are in their seventies and eighties. Which makes me the “young one” here (laughs). Every morning …

Right now, working towards the great challenge of the Peking to Paris Motor Challenge, my early-morning jobs mean I can rarely make it to radio calisthenics or the tidying up after — but there are friends who always keep this challenge of mine in mind and cheer me on.

Today, getting to go for the first time in a while, I received some wonderful and unexpected support. A couple I am very fond of — the husband is 82, and always tells me stories of travelling the world. He says he looks forward to the landscapes I will see on this journey from Peking to Paris.

Analogue, warm-hearted crowdfunding

My seventy- and eighty-something friends handle their phones remarkably well, but social media and anything digital is still genuinely difficult for them. So this was a feeling handed from hand to hand instead.

Living on a pension, this money must matter a great deal for what is left of their lives. Not because they have plenty to spare, but because they chose to put it towards my challenge over their own small pleasures — I received it with a gratitude I cannot measure.

Beside the words “Komo-chan’s dream is everyone’s dream”was written “mine.”That’s right — I will see it with everyone. I promised myself, again, that I will bring back the beautiful view at the far end of a challenge none of us has seen yet.

The teacher of radio calisthenics I call “First-Grade Sensei” — gentle in manner, a man of few words, and always someone I learn a great deal from.

Studying computers bit by bit on his own, he made me a wonderful present like this too! In a sense, the quality of it beats what any young person could manage. “I’ll hand them out to my friends in the poetry-chanting club,” he said. A joyful supporter!

Every one of us, equally, has an end to our life coming.

You take none of it — money, position, honour — with you to the other side. I too am carrying cancer into this challenge.

So nobody can say who sets off first. Nobody at all can say that.

All that is left behind is the story each life told, so I want to build a life with no regrets, together with these wonderful friends.

I will keep taking this on, driving with everyone’s feelings alongside me.