Giving Myself an "Atta Boy"

 

Confession time: I'm not much of an exerciser.

I played rec sports as a kid, and while I enjoyed it, I was never serious about it. Same in college -- I enjoyed playing intramural floor hockey, but that was really about it. Once I graduated and the sort of automatic opportunities to play sports went away, I was never someone who wanted to join a pickup basketball game or anything like that. And things like running, or going to the gym? Forget about it. Always found them to be incredibly boring.

But without consciously working out, being a professor is a pretty sedentary lifestyle. As a graduate student things were a little better just because I lived about a mile's walk from campus -- just the right amount to get some steps in without it being too much of a drain. But then the pandemic hit, and nobody saw the sun for a few years. That corresponding to me hitting my mid-30s was not a great combo.

I tried a few things. We bought a "RingFit" for the Switch -- didn't really catch on. I tried doing sit-ups each morning or using a "stepper" machine, but they didn't really take. One problem is that I have recurrent knee and lower-leg problems, which meant that the shock even of jogging very quickly caused terrible pain. So it was in particularly really hard to do any cardio, which is what I really thought I needed but could never fully motivate myself to do in earnest.

But this summer, my wife and I bought a recumbent bike. And I really like it. More importantly, I've stuck with it. I can get genuine cardio without destroying my knees, which is something that had always been my white whale. And after years of never getting past (extremely) sporadic exercise patterns, I've been able to commit to riding the bike almost every day. I'm not smashing any records or anything like that; my goals have been modest -- at first, just trying to go 10 miles in 40 minutes (the length of one Hell's Kitchen episode). More recently, I kicked that up to 11 miles in 40 minutes, and today, for the first time ever, I did 12 miles in 40 minutes. Again, nothing objectively impressive. But it was a big achievement for me, and so I'm very happy about it.

One of my initial ambitions when I started using the bike admittedly was to lose some weight -- not so much for aesthetic reasons, and more that I have a whole closet full of perfectly good pre-pandemic suits that I'd love to fit back into rather than having to buy a new wardrobe. That hasn't really happened -- my weight has stayed remarkably stable, which is less of a disappointment than a source of profound confusion: I don't feel like I'm eating any differently, so it seems to defy physics that I have the same inputs, can add working out six days a week to my daily routine as outputs, and yet not have it have any effect on my body mass. Newton, hold my beer. But I've decided to stop thinking of it as "not losing weight" and start thinking of it as "a heroic holding-of-the-line against the ravages of middle-aged metabolism."

But really, that's all of secondary concern. The fact is that after years of essentially not exercising at all, I have for the past several months been extremely diligent and reliable in exercising most evenings, and I feel really good about that. So I'm giving myself an "atta boy".

What are you atta boying yourself for this year?