Yes, I’ll acknowledge that. But, at the risk of getting weirdly personal – there are times when I’ve been on a playground when kids weren’t there. My kickball team sometimes played kickball on an elementary school field after-hours, and one time I remember waiting for the team before us to finish, and I started fooling around on the jungle gym. Everyone else on my team just kind of laughed and sat around. When I was volunteering at a fireworks show (before the fireworks actually started) and there was a jungle gym that no kids were playing on, I jumped on it and the other volunteers just watched me. People feel awkward about it.
Uh, you live in Chicago, right ? Try Burnham Park.
You have reminded me that young adults playing in the swing park after a bit of smoking and after the kids had long gone home, has always been a thing.
But we should start a movement to free the playgrounds for all! And nowadays, children’s playgrounds all have this not-hurting, soft-landing sort of surface, so that’s really quite good news for us arthritic unfit people. We should not be deprived of all this fun!
Arise, ye adults from your slumbers …
If the playgrounds offered some kind of reward system, that might work. It seems to me that adults are more drawn to tasks that reward them in some way. Maybe every couple times down the slide you earn a ticket and every ten tickets gives you a tiny piece of candy.
We just like work. And gyms don’t offer much in the way of seeing results unless combined with successful dieting. So much effort for so little reward bums people out unless they’re really dedicated.
I think adults are encouraged to have fun but it does include incentives. The popular stuff I see on Facebook is:
- 5k runs >> Marathons. Usually includes a theme for dress-up. Often includes alcohol incentive, or at least a “swag bag”.
- Arcade bars. Come drink, play as many of our arcade games as you want. There’s at least 3 in my area right now.
- Paint & sip parties. Paint some sort of pre-determined picture or wall hanging, drink wine while you’re at it.
Everyone I know is over-worked at work and then has all sorts of family shit to take care of when they get home. If they have the willpower to get some exercise in, they want max return on the shortest workout possible - which is going to be 30 mins on the treadmill, not 30 minutes on a playground. Free time is for relaxing.
But if it’s done without incentive, it would be relaxing, 'cos it would be for fun.
See, if there was an “incentive” such as collecting ten tickets for a tiny piece of candy, I would immediately start to think, “well, that’s silly, if I want the sweets, why not just buy some?”. I mean, the “incentive” is never really going to be much of an incentive, unless one wants to do it anyway.
I for one would be fearful I would break right through things. I’m not slim.
The way to play in the super cool playgrounds they have nowadays is to … borrow some kids and go have a blast.
I had some tweens in my care for a few years and it was so much fun to go to the playground with them since I could play on all of the fancy modern slides and climbing stuff without having to fear that folks would think I was some creepy dude.
I tried swinging from hand to hand on the monkey bars (knees bent to not drag on the ground) and was surprised at how hard it is as a grownup. I remember doing it all the time as a little kid. Also, playing tag with kids is really hard on the joints since they are so much more agile than we are.
Unfortunately most of my exercise is running to the fridge.
Dojo, fitness centers, paintball parks, boot camps, cross-training gyms…
Mud Run, Color Run…
Where I used to live, there was a community college that had a lot of public service (EMT, Fire Dept, Law Enforcement) courses in addition to the regular curricula (English, Math, etc.) and, in addition to an outdoor firing range, they had an obstacle course. Nobody seemed to care when I went there to ‘play’ on the obstacle course.
There’s also something called a wilderness or an open-space preserve. Nobody cared (or charged us for admission) when my buddies and I (all in college) would go to the nature preserve to run around and dodge between trees and under bushes and over rocks – while trying to avoid being nailed by a projectile from each other’s wrist-rocket slingshot.
And public streets and parks are venues for all sorts of adult exercise – walking, jogging, running, skating, bicycling…perhaps gymnastics, parkour (sp?), martial arts, team sports…
–G!
The free equivalent of an Escape Room experience would probably be
my cubicle at work
There are lots of parks that have, in addition to the usual kid swings, more adult exercise equipment. I have seen them set up as sort of a course where you go from one set of equipment to another.
And for aceplace57 Mission Bay Park has a nice path with a speed limit so he can bike at a leisurely pace. Although on the weekends it is probably too crowded with people walking to be fun for biking.