ExerciseFail
Mar 10th, 2010 by heidi
I still hate exercise.
For the last couple of weeks, the escalator in my downtown metro station has been broken. The first day, I climbed the stairs. Not a good idea. Since my schedule got so hectic and I started sleeping in a bit longer in the morning to compensate for later nights, my husband and I stopped walking up our hell hill to the bus stop and have been catching a ride with my dad in the morning instead. I can certainly tell that my fitness levels have dropped substantially – walking up those stairs (and there are three fairly long flights) left me feeling like I wanted to keel over.
So, I’ve been taking the elevator instead, because I really don’t need to start my day off feeling like I’m going to pass out. Exercise is one thing. Self-torture is quite another.
I had been doing a fairly good job of getting out for walks on my lunch hour but have given those up recently too – it gets boring to do the same thing every day and I just don’t love walking on busy sidewalks as an alternative to the park that I was walking around. Yesterday I compelled myself to walk home from the grocery store, which is a decent 20-minute walk and will do the same again today. The real kicker is that this cuts that time off my evening, which on a night like tonight, when I get home and have to make dinner, take care of the sproglet, and still find time for homework, is a struggle. It’s so much easier and more convenient to just get a ride home.
Eco-friendliness aside, I just don’t like exercise. I don’t have anyone who lives close enough to be a gym buddy (even if I had extra money for the gym, which I don’t). My husband won’t try folk dance classes (if so many of them didn’t fall on weekday evenings anyway) and walking just gets boring. I don’t love it enough to WANT to do it every day.
I want to be more fit. I just hate exercising. Truly I do. I know that it makes me feel better (I can tell that I’m out of shape and it irks me) but that just isn’t incentive enough to get out and do something so bloody tedious. And, of course, being sweaty and out of breath feels disgusting to me, not empowering. It reminds me that I’m fat and triggers every bad body thought I have.
Maybe that latter sentence is key here. Nothing about exercising makes me feel happy. Nothing about intentional movement makes me feel good, except for a smug “ha, I WAS A GOOD GIRL AND EXERCISED!” It instantly becomes self-loathing if, once I’ve walked one time this week, I don’t walk today, or tomorrow, or the next day. If I climb one flight of stairs one day but don’t climb it the next day, I’ve failed and I agonize over it. Why should I get up from my desk and make the decision to move around when that movement is tied in with every bad thing that I feel about my body?
How do the rest of you DO it? How do you find a point where it’s about fun and not just rules? I would love to enjoy movement. I have dreams where I run, and jump, and dance…and love those things but in real life I just don’t. I get out of breath, I get sweaty, and I feel huge, fat, ugly, and disgusting.
Other people think so too. Let’s not forget the Comcast Cable man that mooed at me from his truck one day as I was walking home, or the snide “Do you love Krispy Kreme?” whisper that another man hissed at me when I took up too much space in the crosswalk with my son’s stroller on a mad dash for the bus.
Why can’t I get this one thing right?!
***
It’s ironic, isn’t it, that I typed in “exercise” into my tags and the one that popped up was “hating exercise.” Wouldn’t it be nice to have a “loving movement!” tag that would pop up instead, because I really did?!
I tried to comment to this a few days ago but for some reason WordPress didn’t remember that I was already registered, and I had to re-register, which is super bizarre because I know I’ve commented here before! Ah well.
Anyway I wanted to say that it is too bad we don’t live closer together but I would enjoy being a workout buddy with you to some extent–like maybe as the weather gets nicer we could try to walk around greenlake together once a month or something on weekends?
You know, after graduating in August I took some time in the fall to really do a lot of self-care, and part of that was joining a gym and being more intentional about how often and in what ways I was moving. But before that? I honestly just didn’t have the time, energy, or emotional resources to deal with worrying about it. I think sometimes we have to prioritize, and you are incredibly busy right now. For me a huge part of being able to move more was taking the morality away from it. I stopped beating myself up about being a bad person for having gone so long without exercise (sounds like it was so easy–I just “stopped” … but you know what I mean, I made an effort to cut that self-talk off whenever it started). For me, finding things I actually like to do helped. Having TIME helped. And taking the morality out of it helped. I still catch myself feeling a bit smug when I talk about how many days I went to the gym last week, but most of the time I just think of it as a value-neutral activity that I either enjoy while doing it and/or makes me feel good afterwards.
I don’t know how helpful any of that was, but let me know if you think you might like to try for Greenlake. I’d also be interested in taking some time of dance class with you sometime, because that’s something I’ve always thought might be nice but been too afraid to be the only fat person there.
thanks for the post. i am in a rut with movement. i might even be depressed, but I am not ready to make that declaration yet… anyway I joined the pool for $90 a month and have only been there twice, I enjoy the freedom and feelings when I spent about 40 minutes in the pool both times I went. I just cannot find the motivation to get there. I am trying to not be so hard on myself, but, I do feel declines in my fitness, my lung capacity, my general comfort in my body.
One thought that runs through my head is that maybe if I make it okay to not exercise in the same way I make it okay to eat whatever I want, that I might open myself up to an inspiration to move that I might not have experienced by focusing on all the badness, the fact that I am a bad fattie.
I don’t know what the answer is, but I do know that most of my thoughts around this right now are not self loving.
thanks for the opportunity to participate in the conversation
I feel so angry at the men who would say such horrible things. Shame on them. Those comments would hurt me so deeply. Hugs to you.