I I’d like to thank Jane Fonda for my fitness “discovery” in the late 1980s. As a teenager, I would sit in front of the TV watching her training videos while weaving my way through the carpet. I also spent hours running up and down the pool at my local leisure center and working out my muscles at the gym.
I’ve always considered fitness to be my superpower. It’s definitely something I worked hard on, but it’s also something that gives me credit. Stay healthy – that is. Really Fit – seemed like a noble and admirable pursuit to me. It was easy to match with nice clothes. I was able to move my body believing that I would not fail. Whatever other qualities I didn’t have, even if I wasn’t good enough, I could still walk into the gym or stand at the starting line of a race and pass a meet.
I trained to become a personal trainer so I can guide others to their “fitness goals.” But it was running that really captivated me and quickly became part of my identity. I ran his first marathon at age 22. He later became a coach, wrote a book about running, and hosted running retreats.
Running may seem like freedom, but sometimes it’s about control. You need to run distance, maintain your pace, lose weight, and beat your personal best (PB). I now understand that my insistence on fitness pursuits at a young age was a way to impose control over my body, seek approval, and bring order to my family life, which was falling apart. That worked too. But it also became a habit.
Like a magic suit, a healthy body not only protects you from the disdain of others, but also from common concerns associated with aging, such as weight gain and poor health. But achieving and maintaining such a body takes time, energy, and discipline, and requires rules and restraints that limit life and reek of patriarchal domination.
I’ve been obsessed with fitness for 30 years. But when the lockdown happened, with gyms, athletics fields, swimming pools and running clubs closed, sporting events canceled and running alone restricted, a feeling hit me. What on earth was that for?
One day I was running along a riverbank in the endless glorious spring. I had no joy in running and was beginning to feel unusually tired. After a few miles, the point where I could detach from the physics of the effort and just let it happen proved to be elusive.I was there, every uncomfortable, heavy step, my rhythm spelled out For what, for what, for what? I tried to get through it, but suddenly neither my body nor my brain could find a reason to keep going. I started walking slowly. I stopped my watch. I sat down and cried a little, the sweat drying on my back. Then I walked home.
It wasn’t a one-off. As I continued to exercise, my dedication to fitness felt increasingly empty. And, frankly, shallow. As Sarah Donaghy said when interviewed about the Food Bank Run, “Running can be a solitary, even selfish endeavor, focused on personal performance and personal records. ”
Throughout that summer, I struggled to keep running, squeezing myself like clothes that no longer fit, but I came to think of it as a ball and chain, a drain on my resources. became. This was a huge inconvenience for someone who had built a career primarily around running.
Eventually, I could no longer ignore the questions my body and mind raised. My search for answers made me rethink not only my body and my attitude toward running, but also life itself. The discovery of meaning and purpose, fulfillment and aging, and the ultimate goal of mortality.
Undoubtedly, aging is playing a role in this change. He turned 50 in 2019, and I was beginning to realize that the lack of new PBs was not a temporary phenomenon, but a terminal one. No matter how hard you try, you can’t compete with your 30-year-old self or your 40-year-old self. What if running is no longer about improvement and achievement? can I thought so. What can we get from it? What am I putting in there? Is there anything else I should do instead?
For many people, this is the point where age rating becomes important. Many people find great joy in being “age-appropriate.” A part of me has great admiration for 80-90 year olds training for Masters competitions and pursuing every possible gain. But as our planet and its human and non-human inhabitants face climate change and all the injustices, inequalities, exploitation and losses that come with it, we wonder if we can put all that energy to better use. I can’t help but think about it.
I stopped running altogether for a while and was shocked when some of the clothes I was wearing no longer fit. The embarrassment of my dilated and softened body almost brought me back, but once again my body rebelled and quite literally voted with its feet. “I don’t want to go back to being dominated by running.” I wrote in my diary. “Do you really want to be the same person you were a year ago, five years ago, instead of moving forward?”
It’s been 4 years and I’m weaker than before. You can’t expect fitness to have the same effect on your health. It doesn’t automatically select size 10 clothing, and it doesn’t assume he can run a parkrun in under 22 minutes. Not being able to do these things feels just as uncomfortable as seeing my stomach. But there are also benefits. All the energy I put into his fitness for 30 years will be mine again. I thought more, realized more, wrote more, and had broader interests. I completed a part-time master’s degree last year and volunteer in conservation efforts. I have become more aware of the world around me, both good and bad.
in his essay How to live with deathIn , John Kaag, a philosopher and lifelong avid runner, writes about how his cardiac arrest minutes after finishing a grueling treadmill run changed his outlook on life. “At some point, putting in the extra effort doesn’t make you a better athlete. It just makes you stupid,” he says.
There’s still a strange ache in my old fitness level, my old body, and even the rigors of the pursuit itself. But whatever we lost, we gained so much more. “At the end of the day, most of us wish we could spend less time on the treadmill in some form or another,” Karg writes.
