Sweaty me.
At some point in about eighth grade, they stopped making me run.
I realize now that my gym teacher, a seemingly gruff but deeply compassionate woman of few words, was ahead of her time compared to many of her peers in realizing that any physical benefits of making me join in runs around the athletic fields -- I was always agonizingly slow, always last, always miserably embarrassed -- were more than countered by what it was doing to me as a person, going out there every time and feeling so brutally exposed. And she stopped making me do it. Honestly, it was too late for some of the damage she was trying to avoid, but I don't fault her for that. This was the mid-'80s. If the way we deal with kids and weight sucks now, it sucked even more then.
It was somewhere around this same time that, as I lagged behind on a class hike, a kind-ish teacher I barely knew hung back with me and broached the subject, oh so very gently, that maybe, maybe, it would be good if I lost a little bit of weight. Maybe, I assume she thought, it had not occurred to me. I wasn't old enough to think to myself "OMG, this bitch," which is a good thing, but that's kind of what it makes me think now.
I was probably thirteen or so when all this happened, at a predictable high point of fragility around self-image and self-definition. My doctor had been poking my belly disapprovingly on and off since I was about ... six or seven. It is safe to say that yes, it had occurred to me. I cannot remember, honestly, whether this happened before or after I went to the doctor under my own power when I was about this age to tell him I wanted to lose weight -- something I now recognize as an extraordinary act of will, only to have him roll his eyes and hand me a pamphlet that he told me really "said it all": It was called Are you really serious about losing weight?
I would continue to unpack all this, but I cannot even type about it without crying -- like 40 years later, people! -- so suffice it to say: this is the story. It sucked so much.
TL; DR: On and off, gained weight and lost weight, was put on the Oprah shakes when I was 18 and successfully did not put a bite of food in my mouth for 12 weeks (including my birthday, Thanksgiving, and Christmas) -- look, I've told some of this story before and I don't need to repeat it, because it's actually not the point. I am going to give myself permission to stop crying.
The point is that by the time I bought a Peloton bike during the pandemic, I had good reason not feel that my odds of incorporating it into my life successfully were particularly high. It took me a long time to figure out that this was not laziness or anything like that; it was that I had formed a concept of my physical self that was suffused with feelings of failure, going back to that kid who had to be eventually excused from running (which, by the way, I still absolutely think was the right thing to do).* Nobody runs enthusiastically toward the opportunity to feel terrible, no matter how much it’s supposed to benefit them. Again: I can’t fault anybody for that, including myself.
Interestingly, though I struggled to get into a groove, the bike kinda worked for me. I got pretty into classes with former monk Sam Yo, who I think of as The Calmest Man In Fitness. By early 2022, I was on a little bit of a roll -- I even talked about Peloton culture on the podcast, which is the kind of thing I never, never, never would have envisioned myself doing. My knees suck (anybody who tells you walking or running are suitable first steps for everyone is lying, do not believe it, do not let them tell it to you, it is a hazardous, shitty, fiction), but this actually made them feel better -- I was later told it can lubricate the joints and get fluid out of them. A trip to my doctor suggested that at least some things were trending in a good direction.
Then, on Oscar night, my basement (where the bike was) flooded. Fortunately, the bike itself wasn't damaged, but the disaster was such that the entire basement was torn down to the studs (at least the bottom two feet of the studs), the flooring was torn out, and everything that was down there simply wound up wherever the guys who cleaned the basement could fit it, which meant the bike was just shoved in a corner. Could I have moved everything around, pulled it out, ridden it on the concrete floor? Oh, of course. But not only was that a big job at that point, but bringing it upstairs would have required at least one other person, and using it down there meant that I wouldn't have been working out in a basement, but in a cement cellar. The roll was over. It had been promising, but not yet resilient.
It took months to get the basement disaster resolved, between the cleanup, the deciding what I wanted to do, the meetings with the contractor, the rebuilding, the waiting, the rebuilding, the waiting, and the rebuilding some more. Once I had access to that basement again, I tried to get that roll back, but it was tough going.
So, when January rolled around, I thought -- well, hell, let's try something I have never done before in all my life. Let's try every day. I joined a Peloton challenge where you take a class every single day. Not a cycling class every day (both my general self and particularly my behind would not have been either willing or able to do that), but some class. A strength class, a stretching class -- they even have five-minute meditations, and part of me thought, "I can do this, because if I ever need to just do a five-minute meditation, I can." So -- I dove in. And now I’m at the end of the month, and I actually did it. And along the way, I learned some things.
“Every day” is actually easier for me.
When you start trying to be more active, it can be very comforting to hear that you don't have to do it absolutely every day. Two or three days a week, my doctor told me about the bike. And a couple of the other days, maybe see if you can fit in a strength thing or a stretch.
Here's the thing: Many of us are, I believe, at least ten percent our teenage selves, peering out through our adult eyes, seeing what we get to do, what we get to not do, what we got to stop doing. Thank goodness I don't have to do math problems anymore, thank goodness I don't have to run in front of people anymore, thank goodness I don't have to get report cards anymore. And for me, the idea of exercise -- literally, I hate that word, I hate it, I never use it if I can think of another one -- has long activated in my bones a level of dread that I long associated with laziness but now associate with that history of self-defined failure. It's better just not to have a conversation with myself every day about whether I'm going to take a class or not. It's better just not to dive into the "Do I have to? Can I take the day off?" Every day is easier. Not putting myself through that daily choice, knowing how loaded it is for me, is easier.
The biggest modification is not listening to people who are trying to help.
Lots of people know about "modifying" exercises you see in videos, or you see demonstrated, or whatever. Not everybody can do planks, man -- that's just the way the world is. So you modify it, you make it easier, sometimes with a suggestion from the instructor but sometimes just ... not. With cycling, this often involves the instructor yelling out that you're supposed to pedal at a particular cadence (this is how fast your feet are going) and resistance (this is how hard you make it to pedal), and you being like, "That's a nice idea, but my heart would explode, so I will not be doing that." I always wear a heart rate monitor when I'm cycling, so I always know whether I'm pushing my luck. There is a point beyond which I do not go.
But the more classes I took, the more I realized that no modification meant more for my particular ... I think people say "fitness journey" ... than ignoring well-meaning instructors who were just frankly not talking to me.
Here's what I mean: yesterday, as I write this, I did a 45-minute cycling class with an instructor who kept stressing that she knew you wanted to go harder than we were going, but she wanted you to restrain yourself, because you have to understand that there's value in not going all-out all the time. There's value in building your endurance. Resist that urge to go above the level she was calling for! Resist!
Meanwhile, I was literally dripping sweat onto the bike mat and chanting one of the things that comes up occasionally when I am feeling spirited during class: "Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you." (You want to kind of do it to the rhythm of the bike. It feels great.)
Look, some instructors are teaching their classes with the knowledge that a lot of the people who take Peloton classes are older, or heavier, or beginners, or not in the physical shape they wish they were. They are encouraging, they tell you that you can modify if you need to. Others are pretty fixated on the idea that they are teaching a room full of Gym People who show up to have their asses kicked, to yell "RAR!", and to go very hard and then drink 15 raw eggs or whatever. (This instructor was, among other things, instructing people to pedal for about two and a half minutes at a suggested cadence of 120, and if you have ever ridden a spin bike, you know that that's ... I mean, she could seemingly do it, but it's pretty hardcore for a cycling situation in which you are not being chased by a bear or trying to take off into the sky so that the government doesn’t catch the alien you are hiding in your bicycle basket.)
Not going 120 was easy. Not listening to her go on about how much she knew we wanted to go beyond what she was calling for during other parts of the ride? That was harder. People who want that are entitled to have that, of course — some people really super love that kind of “tough love” “no excuses” approach. (Although some of the instructors occasionally say something like “I wouldn’t be telling you to do this if you couldn’t do it,” which is, like, terrible and something they should not do, but anyway.) The most important modification for me, as it turned out, was ignoring the wrong kinds of "encouragement." Tuning it out, even if I had to swear at them to do it, was everything.
My knees are still a mystery.
When I started this month, anything that involved starting on your hands and knees (which is a LOT of bodyweight exercises, meaning ones that don't involve free weights) made my knees uncomfortable, even with good padding under me. I wasn't sure it was ever going to get any better, but it did. It's still something I watch out for -- if you leave me there too long, I will modify and try something else -- but it's a lot better than it was. However! I have to be very careful about things that feel okay at the time, but cause problems later. I did a barre class that involved a lot of bending your knees in "second position," and the next day was the worst my knees felt all month, even though at the time, it seemed okay. This is just ... learning. And narrowing down options, and making adjustments.
Beware community.
I don't mean to discount the importance of support; support rules. But if you are going to feel unseen by the instructors, you can find yourself far more unseen by other people, all of whom have their own relationships with their bodies that are just as complicated as yours.
I wound up in a Peloton online community where a guy posted a picture of his screen from his workout in what Peloton refers to as "power zones," which is a system where you essentially determine how hard you have to work (in terms of "output," which is a combination of cadence and resistance) to be in your own personal "level 1," "level 2," and so forth, up to a level 7. Obviously, if you are a super athlete, your "level 2" will be at a higher output than mine, and so on. It's actually a system that's really good for beginners in some ways, because if self-modifies -- instead of giving you a cadence and resistance, the instructor gives you a zone. Instead of telling you what to do, they tell you how hard to work.
But it's very much treated like a training program to improve "performance," which means that in any given power zone discussion, you will meet both people like me who like it because it's self-modifying and people who like it because they are trying to become super-athletes and they use it to push themselves as hard as possible.
Anyway, this guy posted a picture of his screen after his workout, basically to show something about the fact that he finished it, something like that. And this other dude literally put his fingers to the keyboard and typed something like "Cadence [x] and resistance [y] and you were in your zone 3?" And then he put two laughing emojis. In other words, this man chose to shame another person for being in inadequate shape because that person exposed that he was trying to work out.
It's just important to keep in mind that "supportive" communities are just ... more of the internet. They can be full of cruelty (not to mention all the people who humblebrag about how they can't believe "all" they did today was, like, 30 miles with a 200-pound barbell on their shoulders, knowing exactly what they’re doing). If you expect people in a fitness forum to be consistently encouraging to anyone who's making the effort, you won't find that. And if stumbling on something like that is going to activate all your shame beasties, it's not worth it.
The only thing I can do is the thing itself.
I don't know whether any of you have gotten to this point and are like, "Did you lose any weight?????" I fought that impulse myself all month long, which I come by honestly, given that I literally cannot remember a day of my life when that wasn't on my mind.
The answer is ... maybe a little? Not a lot. I didn't expect to (I focused on activity and not eating in this particular phase of things), and I didn't. I ate about the same, burned a lot of extra calories, and lost ... almost nothing.
People go back and forth about why this is -- there are people who tell you you're building muscle, which is heavy, but I've seen pretty persuasive evidence that nothing I'm doing would be building muscle at that level. I've seen people say becoming more active leads to inflammation at first, and therefore to retaining fluid. I've seen people say when you use your muscles (especially big ones like the ones in your legs), they hold more water. There are people who shrug and say that part is about food, not activity.
Here's the thing: I don't care. I can't care. If I'm going to do a thing, I have to do the thing, and then doing the thing I decided to do has to be the measure of success. If I hit all these 31 days, then I did the thing I said I was going to do. You can’t say a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step and take that step and then say to yourself, “But what did that step actually accomplish so far?”
The disadvantage of this, of course, is that you don't get a thing to point at beyond the thing itself. When I have tracked food and done serious calorie restriction and been hungry and grumpy, at least at the end I have been able to point at the scale and tell myself, "SEE?" Or, of course, not. If I had a full science lab, I could measure things that might show some kind of change after a month, but they also might not. I certainly feel like I can do more than I could a month ago, but can I prove it? I can't easily, not after a month.
Here's what I do have: Never in my life have I devoted myself to some kind of activity every day for a month. Think of that whatever you will -- lots and lots and lots of people have done that many times, for many months, for years, I get it, I admire you, I credit you.. But I am more than 50 years old, and for me? Never. Never ever. And even more than that, I’ve never mostly liked doing it, mostly felt comfortable with it, mostly felt like myself doing it.
There's a reason I'm writing all this before the final workout of the month, which is that ... these are things I learned from doing it, not finishing it. Even if a monster attacked my city and I could not do the last one, I would have learned all these things. And I wanted to write them down before I forget them. That kid who finally got to stop running deserves to know she got on the bike.
*For a long time, I thought people who were embarrassed in gym class were uniquely traumatized by it, but I now realize that people who struggled with math or languages or just the feeling of being called on in class (all things that were fine with me) had similar experiences, with the only difference being that if you hated math, you could sort of decide not to pursue math as an adult. It's hard to decide to not pursue anything that will expose to other people that you are slow or get tired easily.