Can Fitness Be Sidelined?

You might think you know the answer to that question. Fitness can be sidelined, we say, because Crazy Job, because New Relationship, because Babies Be Babies*.

Ok, yeah. But no.

It's been about 5 years since I contributed to this blog, mainly because I stopped contributing to my fitness. After a series of really annoying injuries and issues (at one point I had a tweaky right knee and a painful left shoulder, which pretty much put me out of any game) I decided to hit the pause button. 

Damn that pause button. It's sneaky - it says Pause then changes to Stop, and life doesn't have a helpful transitional screen saver. Eventually I stopped feeling the need to work out, lost the giddiness of a personal best, misplaced the delicious habit of knowing my own metrics by heart. My V02, heart rate zones, target rpms and pace per mile, almost as dead as the dodo. 

Almost. Because the real answer to the question is this: No, your fitness cannot be sidelined.

Once you have a sense of your own fitness, once that is stamped onto your DNA, injected into your bloodstream, embedded under your skin or tattooed on the back of your neck, that sense doesn't leave you. Your fitness habit will slip next to you in the soft gentle light some dawn and like a delicate kiss, whisper "You're going to age really badly and that's not what I had planned..."

Then it will taunt you when you rise from a good night's sleep and don't feel rested, stand accusingly when you notice your gut popping over your jeans and laugh like an ass when you face plant on the sidewalk.

When we interpret fitness as physical beauty, sculpted abs or Perfect-Butt-in-30-Days! we miss a crucial point. Fitness is feeling incomparable. Fitness is being energized. Fitness is balance, flexibility, grace in handling life's weird twists. Fitness is us: happy.

After a frustrating and stressful job, never feeling quite rested, massaging my waist fat like it was bread dough and quite literally falling flat on my face on Howard Street to great humiliation (Hi guys across the street at Kate O'Brien's, drinking beer and watching me bleed) and expense (emergency room, ambulance, stitches), it finally dawned on me during that delicate dawn kiss that I really missed being fit.

So I'm back at it. New personal metrics, adjusted zones, different targets. My former personal best will stand, but not quite as high on the scale as the simple act of taking my fit self off pause.


*My Tiny90 blog partner, Sara, just had her second baby. She kept running until a month before her due date and will likely start running again the very minute she can. Babies be Babies, but Mom Needs a 3-Mile Run, Dammit :-)

Move It and/or Lose It

Surely, when they update definitions in the Oxford Dictionary, this one should be added:

Desk Job/faet' aess/ (n)

1. Work that involves long hours at a desk.
2. An involuntary method of adding flab and increasing one's BMI.

As I sit here typing this, I can grab my gut with one hand, squish it like kneaded dough, lift it off my thighs, and swing it around like Jeter at home plate.

Homer said it best: "Wu-HOO! Lookit that blubber fly!!" (that's a direct quote from The Iliad.) I've been in this uncomfortable place before, misquoting ancient Greeks and playing with my belly fat. The last time was 8 years ago, just before I decided to take action by joining a marathon training program...which resulted the gain of an additional ten pounds.

Yeeeaaaah.

Now, of course, I know better - it's a balance between food and activity, one dependent upon the other. And I know why every fitness and health magazine cover has at least one blaring-red tease touting flatter stomachs and faster weight loss: The real formula for having the body you want - you, individually - is unique, somewhat complex, and a real PITA to figure out.

There are some decent solutions you can throw at the yoga mat to see if they stick, and we've investigated some of them here. But if you're anything like me, you really, really get into it for a while and then after the 100th mile, the 150th salad or the millionth sit-up, you hit the wall. Suddenly, you want every future Sunday morning to be snuggles and lolling instead of heart rate and Clif shot.

I thought that was OK for a while, and enjoyed not measuring my life by zones and tempos. But it wasn't worth the trade - I grow older, and my fitness declines faster with each year. There's no pause button on this machine, you either keep it moving or lose the ability.

So here I am, starting over, as I said I would over the past months but took no action until now. A motivating desire for fitness is just another wall you have to hit. The wall that is sprayed with tags: "The longer you wait, the longer it takes;" "Aging = Stiffness" and "Nothing changes until you change your mind." It's not inspiration, it's reality. The wall says You Do Not Want To Be That Person.

I've been that person. I love my Sunday mornings. But my Saturday mornings are about miles, supplements, sweat and rediscovered joy.