Since a debilitating bicycle accident in 1999 which ruptured two disks in her spine, Collins, a West Hartford resident and professor of creative writing at Central Connecticut State University, can manage only four hours of sitting a day comfortably. Long distance airplane travel is dicey. She watches television lying down. She mostly writes while standing, her computer perched on a custom-built high table.

In addition to keeping her from sitting for long stretches, the back injury prevented her from lifting anything heavier than a phone book and had the former basketball player and sprinter unable, she said, to even "shuffle around my cul-de-sac" for a year. She once went to see a movie in a theater and fainted from pain when she stood up to leave at the end.

Rather than be defeated by her newfound inability either to sit or to exercise, her back injury became fodder for her new book, "American Idle: A Journey Through Our Sedentary Culture." A travelogue about immobility written over a five-year period, the book explores why Americans are so inactive, with the author visiting places from factory floors and the U.S. Olympic Center and interviewing everyone from a brain expert and the head of the National Center for Bicycling and Walking to find answers.

Collins said that the statistics she learned were among her most startling findings, including that 65 percent of Americans have been overweight since the Eisenhower era, that 80 percent of healthcare costs are lifestyle-related and that a 10-year-old Hispanic boy has a 50 percent chance of developing diabetes.

"Those numbers kept shocking me," she said, describing America's inactive culture as "a crisis of cosmic proportions."

She said that a sedentary lifestyle is more than a health problem, which she called a "one-note analysis." Researching the book, she learned that with decreased physical activity, Americans have lost body awareness, which has had social consequences, she said, and the lack of safe public spaces for inner-city kids to play is a civil rights issue, among other examples of how crucial movement is to well-being.

She approves of longer recess -- she doesn't buy the argument that children need more class time, pointing out that in Sweden, students get an hour of recess and students there perform better than those in the U.S. -- and favors dedicating half the fields in a community for spontaneous and free play, saying that free play leads to better fitness than participation in organized sports, and that an hour spent running around the playground is better exercise than an hour of volleyball practice, where a player is "lucky" to get in five minutes of movement
When she heard that to save money, Hartford public schools were eliminating some bus routes and now requiring more students to walk to school, she thought the change was wonderful.

Though she still cannot sit for long periods of time, Collins, a graduate of Bugbee Elementary School and King Philip Middle School who has written for National Geographic Magazine and published books about the history of NPR and the Wright Brothers, now swims in the morning and purposefully incorporates movement into her daily routine. She will walk to mail a letter, and intentionally park some distance from the grocery store to make exercise part of the errand.

She even got back in the saddle, riding her bike around the West Hartford Reservoir for the first time this year.
"Instead of working at a desk eight hours a day and then playing basketball a few times a week, I must stand, walk, stretch, walk, stand, stretch, walk throughout every day," she wrote in a 2002 essay for the Washington Post. "Now I see the chair, and the rigid world that surrounds it, as the "barbarian" import that I must break free from if I want to retain any power in my legs."

Mary Collins is scheduled to speak at Borders bookstore, 1600 South East Road, Farmington, on Thursday, Oct. 22, at 7 p.m. Admission is free.