RL(S)

Choosing Fitness

I saw Blaine’s post about getting into fitness and decided to take the time to post my own story of how I made exercise a part of my life. It’s been almost two years now since I started getting in shape, and despite a lot of ups and downs along the way, I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything.

One of the requirements for becoming a don (RA) at my residence was that I had to complete a basic first aid and CPR course. It was a weekend class, covering the basics of injuries and how to deal with them. Enough time has passed that I don’t recall the details, but I do remember hearing about all of the diseases associated with lack of physical activity and poor eating habits. I decided that I needed to make a change. I wasn’t overweight, but I wasn’t in good physical condition, and things weren’t moving in the right direction. I decided that I wanted to fix that. So I did what every person who wants to improve their body image does: I hit the gym.

Looking back, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I exercised too much: 6 or 7 times a week of exercise that was at a very high intensity given my fitness level. I didn’t eat the right types of food, and because I wasn’t used to exercising so much, I didn’t eat enough of it. As a result, my stomach was never satisfied and I would go through periods of eating way too much as my body tried to compensate. Looking back, it’s surprising that I was able to stick with it through the bumps in the road.

This wasn’t the first time that I tried to improve my physical fitness. I can remember using the only piece of cardio equipment my parents owned, a machine sort of like a stair climber, in an attempt to improve my track and field performance in grade 5. Over the years, I’d picked up running for a time (the longest stretch was in high school, when I was on the cross country team), but it never lasted. So what was different this time?

To put it simply, I made fitness a part of my life. I listened to my body when it said it was sore. I started paying attention to what I was eating, figuring out how different types of foods made me feel and how much food I really needed to feel satisfied. I switched up the types of exercise I was doing to add variety and make sure that I was doing things that I enjoyed. All of this happened gradually, and I’m still learning, two years later. But I get better every week.

Over time, exercising became a part of who I am. It’s no longer something that I do because I force myself, it’s something that I like to do. These days, I’ve shifted more to running: I finished my first marathon in July and am training for another one in December, trying to run it fast enough to qualify for the Boston Marathon. That’s my current goal, but after I’m done with marathoning, I’m also looking forward to cycling more, swimming, trying out rock climbing, and maybe even learning to skate better. Meanwhile, I’m doing some weight training to gradually strengthen my body.

To anyone else who’s looking to get into shape: In a world of quick fixes, exercise is one of those things that takes time to do right. At the grocery store, I see magazines claiming to offer a plan to drop 15 pounds in a month. Leaving the physical impossibility of that aside, these type of plans give people the false impression that, by trying hard enough for a short period of time, they can undo the damage done by years of poor eating habits and inadequate exercise. That’s just not how it works, and very few people have the willpower to do something they hate for a period of time that could stretch into years. You’ve got to make fitness a part of who you are, something that you do because you enjoy. Blaine is right: fitness is a journey, not a destination. And it’s a journey worth taking.