What is the Exercise Habit?
Hi, my name is Jessica. I’m an entrepreneur, a mother, a baker, a runner and an all-around average ‘modern’ woman.
Like most working women my age, I often find that there never seems to be enough time in a day to do all the things that need to be done.
Yet somehow, I still manage to fit at least four quality workouts into my jammed schedule every week.
Over the years, I have had many friends, co-workers, and the occasional stranger, ask me how I do it. Eager to start a fitness routine that sticks, they come to me looking for some magic key to help them unlock this stickiest of doors.
Despite the fact that my father, a psychologist and avid exerciser (more on him in a later post), wrote the actual book “The Exercise Habit” a decade before, I never read it and I never had a good answer. Until recently.
But before we get there, we need some background.
Growing up, the oldest of four kids, I was the bookworm. Every summer, when my wildly athletic younger siblings were swimming, skateboarding or riding bikes, you would find an alarmingly pale younger version of myself sitting in the shade on a lounge chair, deep in a book, oblivious to my noisy surroundings.
I had no intrinsic drive to be active, and because I never struggled with weight issues, I had no extrinsic motivation either. As a teen, I was much more interested in socializing than running track or playing volleyball after school. And as I entered adulthood, I became consumed with building a career.
Fast-forward a decade. Newly thirty, newly married, working long hours and traveling for business meetings much of the time. I eat fairly well, but my energy is never great and I am struggling with insomnia. Add to that increasingly intense feelings of stress, and I realize I am becoming less and less happy with my life and starting to feel very stuck.
And then I have a dream.
In it, I am running — like, full out running — on and on, past buildings and through fields, into and out of neighbourhoods. It’s exhilarating. I feel free and deeply alive. My legs are powerful and strong, my mind is clear. I am no longer stuck. And then the alarm goes off and I wake up and trudge through another numbing day.
But the dream stays with me. I keep thinking about how incredible it felt to be so strong, in control and “in” my own body.
So one evening, I put on some old workout gear and walk over to the local track. I run a lap. And then I sit down and die. Defeated, I walk home. But the next evening, I find myself back at the track. I run another lap, then two.
Week after week, I keep coming back. Sometimes my gym-rat husband comes with me, for moral support. He lopes beside me, yelling encouraging words that I don’t feel I deserve. Sometimes I get so mad at his cheerleading that I walk off the track and head home.
Each time I return, it is painful, hard and embarrassing. And I am frankly terrible at it. As a former smoker, I have no cardio endurance and my muscles are basically overcooked spaghetti. But something about pushing my body well past its comfort zone becomes its own reward.
I join a “walk-run” 5K program at a local running shop. Week after week I am shocked to realize that I can run for longer stretches without stopping. The first time I run for 5 minutes straight, I walk on air for days afterwards. Soon, I am running, wait for it, 30-minutes at a stretch.
I enter and run my first 5K race — the Toronto Pride & Remembrance 5K. As I run over the finishers mat in a swirl of rainbow confetti, I am surprised to see that I clocked just over 27 minutes. Now I’m hooked.
And so it begins. 10K races, half marathons, a (disastrous) NYC marathon. I can’t stop, I won’t stop. And I don’t even know why.
But here’s the thing. I really do know why, and it is very, very personal.
Suddenly, I am doing something with real and trackable results. I am seeing that the effort I put in yields an outcome…of my choosing. This is unlike virtually any other part of my life. In my career, there are raises and promotions and the “reward” of bigger projects. But besides paying for my mortgage, it doesn’t give back. It is in service of a larger organizational goal that I did not set. In my marriage, there are good days and bad days, but there is no goal post.
Only in my running is there an actual measurable goal, that I alone set, and accomplish. And this gives me strength and courage in every other area of my life. I mean, hell, if I can complete a marathon with a torn calf muscle, pretty sure there is not much I can’t do.
Plus I am sleeping at night. And my skin glows. And oh, those muscles that were limp noodles, they’re pretty taut now. I have energy. I mean, I have energy to burn. And when I am sidelined with an injury, or my travel to China takes me way off course and I stop running, I feel it. And frankly so does everyone else around me. I am less upbeat, more critical, I find it harder to focus and my ideas are not as sharp. In short, I feel the way I felt before I started running. And I don’t want to go back there.
Over the years, I have added spinning, elliptical, strength and yoga training at various times for various reasons. Running is hard on the body, injuries happen, and as I get older, they take longer to heal from. Nothing will ever match my first love, but if I can’t run I can still move my body. And that has become its own desired outcome — getting out of my head and inhabiting my body feels like a gift that is always there for me to open. I just need to make the choice each day, to untie the ribbon.
So when anyone asks me how they too can have what I have — a lasting, enjoyable, meaningful relationship to fitness — my answer is always to make it personal. Very personal. Because if you are only trying to do it because you think you should, or because you would rather your thighs don’t rub together quite as much, forget about it. It will never stick. The Exercise Habit is something that comes from your why, not one that belongs to anyone else.
Join me — the average gal, and my father, Dr. James Gavin, the real-life expert — right here each week to explore transformational stories, ideas and ways into the why of fitness. Once that part becomes clear, the how is entirely up to you.
