My athletic plans

I used to be an athlete. Professionally. For 2 years post high-school, my day consisted of training and performing. It was good, awesome, actually, until I got injured.

Then I went to college, then graduate school, where my athlete’s body help up…decently on a superficial scale…with very little maintenance…until my metabolism slowed down and I gained 20 pounds, few of which I have actually managed to lose.

It was goodbye professional athlete body, hello grown-up-in-the-real-world body. And it has been a difficult thing for me to accept.

I’ve seem people go from zero to athlete at my age, and I envy them the fact that they are and may continue to be in the best shape of their lives for several years to come (if they keep up the hard work). This – being in the best shape of my life – is an impossibility for me now, because I WAS in the best shape of my life as a full time professional skater at the age of 19. That is a high point that I can never reach again. And it bums me out. I mean, sure, plenty of people who are out of shape or feel out of shape, know how hard it is to feel limited in their fitness gains. But with hard work, many of them can really move towards being in the best shape of their lives. Me? It’s all been downhill since I turned 20.

Another thing that I’ve let work against me in the past decade? This whole “going to the gym thing”. It’s been hard for me to get into. Before I quit skating to go to college, I never had to do a single crunch, a single squat. I didn’t have to spend an hour on the cardio machines 3x or more per week to stay in shape. Furthermore, to me, going to the gym for 1-2 hours and doing these things didn’t feel like a work out. I was athletic on an elite level. That whole “no pain no gain” thing? That was me! And it wasn’t just something my coaches told me, in fact, no one ever told me this, but it’s what I developed in my head as a concept of physical fitness: “real” physical training makes your muscles ache until they scream at you “enough, dear god, just let me sleep now!” I’ve never had that feeling on the treadmill or the elliptical machine. So I let my little attitude problem get the best of me.

Then I decided it was time to face the facts. I was in my late 20s and working well over 40 hours per week. Training at the level I used to train was no longer possible. Period, end of story.  My choices were either to sit around in boycott of the gym and not stoop the “unworthy level of exercise”  and get fat, or reinvent my vision. I chose the latter. It was about a year ago that one of my friends, one of the ones who went from zero to fitness buff (and in the middle of graduate school, at that), ran a half marathon. I had a moment of clarity: If she can start from nothing and get in shape like that, what the hell was my excuse? So, I started running, with a goal of doing a 10k. After that, I was addicted. I signed up for a half marathon in October. I’ve recently decided to start training for a full marathon being held next January (The Disney marathon. Shut up – it’s still 26.2 miles!)

Training for long distance running has been one of the best and healthiest exercise habits of my life. There are several reasons why I would recommend this to anyone who is healthy enough to run. Long distance goals are real fitness goals. Not that “I’m going to lose 10 pounds this month” horseshit that we occasionally feed ourselves. Having a distance running goal is much healthier, both physically and mentally than these short-term superficial weight goals. It used to be that if I gained three pounds, I really start watching my diet. If I gained 4 or more pounds, I obsessively diet and work out until I was at my “normal” weight. Some of this was practical for my occupation back in the day: I did some pairs skating and had to stay light enough to be lifted overhead and tossed around. But then I carried on that mentality into my post-skating lifestyle, and it is just not something that I can afford to tax myself with any longer. With a real long term distance goal, like running 26.2 miles in a year from now, I am constantly working towards that goal, with checkpoints along the way, but it gives the freedom to not tear myself down if I can’t get to the gym for a week. It’s physically more healthy too. For example, last night, I started my run and a mile into it, my knee started to bug me. When it didn’t go away after a few minutes and the pain started to become a little stronger, I stopped and decided to take a few days off. I can do that…because I’m not trying to lose 2 pounds this week, or ten pounds this month, or meet some insane goal of doing x hours per day of exercise to meet a superficial short term goal. Having a long term goal means I can silence all those superficial alarms  and listen to my body. It was hard to quit on a workout, and I probably pushed my knee about a quarter of a mile farther than I should have in hopes that my knee pain would lessen and I could complete my six mile run, because I can’t wait to get passed 6 miles which is the check point after which I really begin to feel amazing, but I was able to tell myself that “in the grand scheme of things, taking care of myself and running 26.2 miles in a year is more important than running five more miles today.”

So it begins.

 

 

 

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