Category: Sweat

When I turned eight, I was the youngest girl on my AAU traveling basketball team. I played rec softball, too. I tried my hand at high school volleyball (it wasn’t really my thing). I’ve been riding horses since I could walk, which takes a whole lot more muscle than you’d think (hanging on, lifting saddles, not letting a one-ton horse drag your little four-foot self around the yard…). In high school, I was on the equestrian team barrel racing in competitions.
Needless to say, I was into sports and I was competitive. And, the general expectation for these sports was to run, lift weights, and get faster, stronger and tougher than your competitor. Have you ever done a rebounding drill in basketball when the loser has to run baseline to baseline 30 times in 60 seconds? Yeah, it gets intense (especially with a group of high school girls–talk about some drama). Cue eye roll.
We would lift weights three times a week, run until we couldn’t feel our legs, and scrape ourselves up diving for softballs. My mind was always at high-speed. You have to be at a high-intensity to keep pushing yourself through the pain, the burn, the fatigue. It was exhausting, exhilarating and rewarding all at the same time.
But, that was when I was a spry high schooler that could bounce back after a 20-minute power nap, and my life was just sports.
Now, I’m not ‘old’ by any means, but in the real world, unless you’re a professional athlete, trying to do that kind of intense workout all the time just isn’t possible. Aside from work, volunteering, juggling bills and household responsibilities, friends, family and everything in-between, there’s no room left in my brain at the end of the day to push through a multiple hour workout EVERY DAY. And, I know we can ALL relate to that feeling.
When I realized my workout life could never be the same as high school, I was a bit lost. I didn’t want to become part of the 80% of adults who don’t get the recommended amount of exercise. And, I wanted to be healthy and feel good about my body. But, I only knew one way to ‘get in shape’, and that was to run myself to exhaustion, gauging progress by the level of drenched my shirt was and the soreness I felt.
My competitive spirit took a hit since I couldn’t figure out how to find a new alternative way to exercise in my adult life. Nothing seemed to be quite right to fill the adrenaline-pumped life of sports I used to know.
That was until I signed up for a beginner’s yoga class…
Now, I had my doubts about yoga. “This isn’t a workout. I’ll probably just end up falling asleep while I lay my face on the squishy mat…” (Full disclosure: this kind of happened one time…) But, I was in my twenties and my friends were doing it, so I figured what the heck, I’ll give it a try. What’s there to lose? (I could at least gain a naptime in my day…)
Ha! Was I wrong. Pleasantly wrong. Some forms of yoga may not have made me sweat through my shirt, but I sure as heck felt those sore muscles the next day. I began to realize each week I went that this was doing something great to my mind and body (yes, I know how cheesy that sounds). And, come to find out, yoga is one of the top ten health practices used by adults today.
But, don’t get me wrong, I felt awkward sometimes. I didn’t know what all these new words were (like, what the heck is a ‘downward dog’?), and I wasn’t all that well-balanced and stumbled a bit, but thankfully it was a beginner’s class, so I wasn’t alone in that.
I’m an outwardly optimistic person, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have those typical negative thoughts about how I look or my weight (“I’m so far away from having a thigh gap! Ugh.“) But, as I would stand in some new pose with my foot here and my hands there (maybe a little wobbly), I would shut my eyes, quiet my thoughts, and feel a sort of empowerment (as in, “why would I even want a thigh gap? That’s not something I want to work toward. I like my thighs, they’re strong. I used to work hard to get these thighs, and it made me a better athlete! Yeah, I love my thighs. Boom.“)
I’d leave that room not only feeling accomplished in an exercise, but feeling better about my day and myself. And, since I grew up an athlete, and yoga isn’t really a ‘competitive team sport’, I started competing against myself. How much more flexible could I get? How much more balanced could I be? How many poses could I achieve without falling over?
Don’t let me fool you, I’m no expert yoga master. I just finally got Triangle Pose and Cobra down (and, those are still beginner moves). I still love sports and play them plenty (I need some of that actual competition against other people!) But, yoga showed me a new way to be healthy without draining my mind and body and instead recharging them. Studies have shown that yoga is a proven stress-reliever, brain power-booster, and will increase your happiness, and I now see that all to be true. It was just what I needed to throw into my exercise routine. Bonus: it gives me another reason to wear yoga pants, too.
So, for all you hardcore sports people out there, who are maybe becoming just weekend warriors and maybe having a hard time figuring out how to live a healthy life with less sports, give yoga a try. Or, heck, even if you’re a superstar and still dominate at sports, try tossing yoga into your life. I bet you’ll be as pleasantly surprised as I was.

I wasn’t in what I would consider even moderately good shape until sometime in college. To be more specific, I was that chubby kid whose shoe would magically come untied when we had to run the mile in gym class. Yes, I untied my own shoe. Sometimes twice. I just needed a second to rest. Don’t judge.
My point is that I haven’t always been a runner. And actually, I still struggle to call myself a “runner,” even though I do technically run. I’m slow and inconsistent, but I do it.
I was probably about 15 when I first considered the possibility of running. There were many times throughout high school when I would see other people running and decide to give it a try. I wanted to lose weight, I wanted to not be out of breath all the time, and, of course, I wanted to look like all the other girls looked, or at least how I felt they looked.
However, I was so self-conscious about people seeing me run that I would stop to walk every time a car would pass by (luckily I lived in the middle of nowhere so that didn’t happen all that often). Needless to say, I gave up pretty quickly.
It was during my sophomore year at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh when I finally started seriously thinking about running. Each student had to take a kinesiology class. I guess it was somebody’s bright theory that a mandatory two-credit class that no one took seriously would solve America’s obesity problem. Anyway, we had to set a health or fitness goal as part of the class. Most people blew it off as the joke of an assignment that it was. But I, being the goody two-shoes student I always have been, took it seriously.
My goal was to run one mile without stopping, something that never seemed to be a problem for anyone else my age. There was an indoor track at the fitness center on campus, and I decided to use it, even though there were always other people there who could actually see me running. It was terrifying. I would just lock my eyes straight ahead and try to block out all the people who I thought must be staring in horror at this girl who clearly had no business being there. That probably didn’t happen, but I don’t remember ever looking around to check.
What I do remember though is feeling really proud when I was able to run nine laps around the track (each lap was one tenth of a mile). In my head I had reached my goal. I don’t actually remember running my first full mile because for some reason I was irrationally excited about those first nine tenths. It felt like a huge achievement. Apparently fractions aren’t my thing, but I guess that’s why I majored in journalism.
My endurance slowly improved, and early the next spring I signed up for my first 5K (yes, it took me about a year of running on my own before I signed up for my first race). Although I previously had run more than 3.1 miles consecutively, I was actually nervous. But it’s that fun kind of nervous. The kind that leads to the type of post-race adrenaline that makes you sign up for longer races. The kind that led to a 10K later that summer, and then a half marathon in the fall.
I don’t think I realized what I was getting into when I signed up for the Fox Cities Half Marathon in 2011. I found a beginners’ training plan online and just decided to go for it. My last long run before race day was supposed to be 10 miles. I planned out a course near my house that should have been about that length. It ended up being closer to 11. Since I wasn’t all that experienced with running, I didn’t think twice about going in the middle of the day when it was unusually hot outside. I didn’t bring enough water, and by mile 6 I was dying and ended up walking most of the last few miles. It was not an encouraging way to finish my training.
Then it was race day. Thankfully, it was much cooler than during my final training run. The weather was perfect, the energy at the start line was amazing, and suddenly I was at mile 10 before I realized what was happening. I remember somebody making a joke about having only a 5K left to run, which made the rest of the race seem strangely doable. I didn’t fully realize it at the time, but the running community is just supportive like that. You don’t have to know anyone, but if you’re running the same race it’s like you’re old friends, at least for those 13.1 miles.
Then I saw the marker for the last mile. I felt that same sense of premature accomplishment as when I first started running a few years earlier. I passed that sign and thought the race was done. It wasn’t, and that last mile dragged on. And on. It took 2 hours and 20 minutes (which was 10 minutes under my goal time, by the way), but I finished.
My mom and stepdad were there to cheer me on. It felt like I was actually a real athlete, which is something I never tried in high school, unless marching band counts.
The feeling at the finish line of a race is almost indescribable. Everyone’s congratulating you and trying to hand you medals, t-shirts and water when all you really want to do is lay down or die. But the energy is so positive that you can’t even imagine turning any of the smiles or compliments away.
Between the chocolate milk, bagels, medals, and adrenaline rush, I was hooked. I signed up for another race about six months later, and I completed my seventh half marathon this past fall, where I finally met my goal of finishing in less than two hours.
However, even after discovering that I actually do enjoy running and the highs that go with it, it’s sometimes still a daily struggle to remind myself of that. Sometimes it’s too cold, or it’s too hot. Or it’s too rainy, sunny, windy, not windy enough, or too anything else that I can think of to justify not running that day. If those sound like excuses, it’s because they are. I’m way better at making excuses than I am at running.
But I still do it. Because at the end of the day I get to call myself a runner. Because I run. And that’s really all it takes. I even do it now without the fake “shoe tying” breaks, so nothing is unattainable.