A Year of Working Out

A year ago last week I started working out at Kinetic Fitness with coach Cayla Jardine-Hunter. As I wrote back in December, after I’d been at it for just three months:

Do I love it?

Not completely. I keep going, week after week. I haven’t faltered. Some mornings I wake up and think “fuck, it’s Tuesday.” Some mornings, though, I think, honestly, “I get to work out today!”

And nothing beats the feeling of just having worked out, no matter how exhausting it is.

That’s much the same place I find myself a year in, with an increase in the “I get to work out today!” and a decrease in the “fuck, it’s Tuesday.”

Nine months in I wrote again:

I’m here to write about a brief moment, in the middle of an up-down (oddly, the most taxing of the three movements for me), where I realized that the only way to finish 15 rounds was going to be to treat each and every movement as an accomplishment unto itself. I wasn’t going to get to the end by focusing on what I’d done, or how much was to come; all I could do is one up-down. Or one thruster. Or one chest to bar.

I don’t reach that level of presence every time, but I get there more every week. 

Last week, part of temporarily switching my workout from 9:15 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. for a few weeks, I found myself in the gym at the end of a long day as opposed to at the beginning. There was a lot of skipping — single unders in gym parlance — and if I’ve learned anything about skipping it’s that the devil is found in overthinking it. It turns out that being tired after a long day is a great way to not overthink, and I killed the single unders, because I didn’t have the energy to think about skipping, I just “did it.”

Over 52 weeks I’ve worked out about 85 times; I missed some workouts due to travel, or illness, or holidays. But when I’ve been able to workout, I’ve gone, consistently. And somewhere in there it became a habit; that’s a big deal for me, after a very long time as a largely-sedentary person.

I have a huge sense of accomplishment about keeping this up, one that extends beyond the bounds of physical fitness, and into simply realizing that personal change, new habits, a new sense of agency, is possible at any time in life.

I’ll be back in the gym tomorrow.

PS: Cayla has space in the 9:15 a.m. Tuesday and Thursday “micro-group” classes. You don’t need any experience to join, you don’t need to be a “gym person,” or really any particular kind of person. I can vouch for her skills as a coach, and I can vouch for the power of working out with others, which only serves to amplify, through collegiality, the entire experience. You can learn more on her website.