Enough

Sixteen years and 70 pounds ago, the idea of running three miles at a time was a breeze.

As a (admittedly not very good) high school cross-country runner, distance running was what I did for three years, regularly finishing 5k races in 19 minutes or less, nowhere near the front of the pack or even the top seven on my team, but a respectable average time nonetheless.

Which brings us to today. I’m not sure what exactly got into me — maybe it was the hundreds of dollars with of Nike winter workout gear in my closet, maybe it was the fact that I was wide awake staring at the ceiling at 6 am on the day after New Year’s — but I decided I’d try and relive the halcyon days of my youth out on the lakefront path.

So, with a wind chill in the teens, I laced up my shoes, put on my running jacket to brace against the cold (again, thanks Nike!) and headed towards Lake Michigan against my better judgment. “This will be just like riding a bike,” I thought, even though my exercise habits over the past two decades can at best be described as “sporadic.”

Wrong.

Roughly 90 seconds in, I began to feel every single beer I’ve drank and slice of pizza I’ve eaten over the past 16 years. The gangly 160 pound 17-year-old high school athlete who could crank out three miles as a warmup had been replaced by a pudgy 229 pound 33-year-old writer who struggled to run for three minutes straight without stopping, and even then at a pace that paled in comparison to all the other weekend warriors out on the path in the freezing cold with me.

“Start running,” the run tracker app on my phone exhorted, as it had me alternating between three minutes of running and three minutes of walking, and I cursed it loudly as I tried to find the energy to obey its commands.

For the first time in a long time while completely sober, I was utterly disgusted with myself. Over the past decade and a half, I’ve put a lot of effort into my career, of putting myself in a position where I’ve enjoyed a lifetime of really cool experiences in a relatively short period of time.

While my career has always — and will continue to — come first, at some point along the way, exercise became less of a priority until it was completely out of the equation altogether as it does for any number of people once they reach adulthood. In high school, you’ve got gym class and team sports to keep you in shape. In college, most schools have exercise facilities on campus that rival the kind you’ll pay a not-insignificant amount of money each month as an adult to avoid like the plague even after you sign up for a membership.

How does that happen though? Is it the grind of the 9-t0–5 that takes that much out of us to the point where either getting a quick 45 minutes in before or after work isn’t something we can squeeze into our schedules? Life gets in the way, but maybe we allow it because it gives us a convenient excuse to do something that we don’t really enjoy doing to begin with.

Enough.

I’m never going to be 160 pounds again, but I am going to stop letting my schedule serve as a crutch for why I can’t squeeze in a couple of minutes here or there to break a sweat. I’m never going to be 160 pounds again, but damn if I’m not going to run three miles without stopping at some point.