Excercise

I’ve never had a very good relationship with my body.

It has to be said that my dad didn’t really help things. I inherited his perfectly silly-looking body (thanks dad!) with his narrow shoulders, his pot belly, his wide hips, but NOT his majestic, towering stature. On top of that, it just seems like my whole body is grossly asymmetrical – twisted and misshapen. I think I first became self-conscious about my body when I was in my pre-teen years. It was really, really early – probably around age 9 or 10? I hated taking my clothes off around other people and did everything I could to avoid it. I remember when my gym class had a swimming unit for a few weeks, I feigned illness (sea sickness?) to get out of wearing a bathing suit. So I sat there in a chair, by the side of the pool, watching all of the other kids swimming and just generally having fun, wishing I my body wasn’t so un-presentable.

I hated the locker room and all the humiliations of high school gym class so much that I managed to get out of it all together, eventually. I claimed that I had debilitating joint pain and that I couldn’t participate. I was a medical mystery – one doctor claimed it was ‘juvenile arthritis’. They even gave me a cane to walk around with – not that I took it anywhere outside my house. I was too young and stupid to realize that I was only cheating myself out of regular exercise. I still can’t believe that I lied like that to all those people, but I’m sort of willing to forgive myself given that I was also clinically depressed and regularly attempting suicide – lying about joint pain and getting out of gym class was a venial sin.

Anyways, I’m older now and I’ve never run more than maybe a mile in my life, prior to a few weeks ago. I’ve been running at night the last few weeks, working my way up to 10K. I feel fantastic. I have more energy and my body just feels like it’s working properly now. I had so much energy this weekend that I stormed through the yard work and still managed to clean up much of our basement.

I spent 10 years trying to make weight training in gyms work, and it just didn’t. I’m so done with lifting weights. If it works for you, that’s nice – I’ve pumped so much iron and exhausted every muscle in my body so many times lifting weights, with absolutely no results to show for it, in spite of having hired professional trainers, that I don’t think I’m ever touching another dumbbell. Phooey.

Tonight’s run was hard – I ate too much for dinner and that made it really uncomfortable. My wife has been running all her life and she’s been giving me tips and instructions – I guess I would have gotten the same thing from a gym teacher if I had one. Oh well.

I’m not sure whether I’m going to try to run more than 10K. My body still looks pretty silly. It’s looking a little bit better, but whenever I want to get a better idea of how my body looks, I stare at it with two mirrors. That reverses the orientation – my left side is my right side and vice-versa. That makes my body look less familiar – it looks more like someone else’s body and is more like how someone else would see my body, I’m guessing. When I do that, I still look pudgy and asymmetrical – I still have narrow shoulders and a big gut, and if I were a teenager I would still be reluctant to take off my clothes in front of anyone. But I’m not a teenager anymore – I’m old and I don’t care as much about what other people think of me.