Adventures in exercise

I guess you could say it all started in elementary school.

Remember that kid that was always dead last running the mile? That was me.

I remember:
A. Struggling to breathe
B. Clinging to another child to cross the finish line
C. Crying
D. All of the above

In my defense, it was never easy being told to run four laps in jeans and a sweatshirt. All right, so there were kids that managed to run outrageously faster than me, wearing the same attire, but let’s ignore that.

Being an incredibly poor athlete at 9 years old didn’t say much about my physical ability later in life. The mile was something I always dreaded. In high school, however, there were all kinds of kids who played sports in my gym class-and they played them for fun.

What was this nonsense? While my lack of interest in chasing a ball or climbing a rope isolated me and made me wonder if I was missing out, it also caused my gym grade to plummet. I made up for it with extra credit, but I had to wonder, was there a sport I could learn to like?

Enter my gusto to try at sports. My first attempt was to join all the popular “hot girls” at my high school, who tried out for field hockey. Naturally, accepting that I was one of these “hot girls” (laughable!), and because it looked like fun, I took a summer camp in the sport. While the experience with teamwork, learning from an actual coach and meeting other girls was beneficial, that’s about all field-hockey camp was.

After two bruised thumbs, losing the “championship” between the teams, competing in the camp and realizing my sarcastic sense of humor wasn’t something everyone could appreciate, I realized field hockey wasn’t for me. Maybe the deciding moment was when I knew another girl, named Lisa, was the best player on our team, and I was the worst.

“Not that Lisa; that Lisa is awesome!” was a little too much to bear. Sport number one, down.

I turned my attention to theater and to improvisation sports, but when I ended my high-school days and moved on to college, I suddenly reawakened the desire to get fit. After all, the Stuart C. Siegel Center was free! I no longer had an excuse not to go to the gym-and after a couple days with two helpings of Shafer at every meal, I was just about ready to run a mile voluntarily to make up for them.

Instead of wanting to be part of a sports team, I focused my interests on achieving something better: an Olympic-worthy figure. Not that anyone truly needs to be perfect, and not that I am obsessive-compulsive with the idea, but I figured going to the gym a couple times a week would be awesome-and I’d look fabulous. I would discipline and train my body into a calorie-burning machine.

This story is a tragic one. When I first walked into Siegel, I was intimidated immdiately. I guess the thought that people at the gym actually know what they’re doing never occurred to me. Playing it safe, I stuck to the elliptical for about 30 minutes and kept my head down. Going to the gym wasn’t just doing something to pass the time; it was relaxing. I never had imagined exercising as a way of relaxing. I could listen to music, could read a magazine and could think about stuff.

After a week or so, I decided to participate in one of the group-exercise classes Siegel offers. The class I chose was Body Sculpting. Afterward, let’s just say I couldn’t walk properly for a week. The stairs to my classes were torture and even getting out of my XL twin bed was an exercise in frustration. Needless to say, I did not go back to the gym for the rest of the semester.

I managed to work my way in and out of Siegel every couple weeks-just so I could think I had reached my quota for the month. This process doesn’t exactly get you the body you want.

Maybe I just need to admit to myself that I’m not the kind of person that exercises all the time. I guess if I was, I would have been that person at 9 years old, and I might have enjoyed running the mile.

Progressing as an athlete is not the same as progressing as a person, and the more I think about it, it probably would do me better to be obsessed with becoming a better person. I just will leave out the extra helpings of Shafer from now on.