The Quiet Glory of Aging into Athleticism
Content Warning: If reading about people and exercise of any kind just generally makes you feel like crap no matter the tone or purpose, listen to yourself and opt out! We’ll be back on Sunday with non-exercise content galore.
In elementary school, I was that kid who figured out how to hide behind some random outdoor building to skip doing laps 2 and 3 of the mile. During my short and undistinguished soccer career, I once locked myself in a bathroom to avoid going to a game. We only had right-handed mitts for P.E., and I never really learned how to catch (or throw) a ball. I really liked my high school history teacher, but not nearly enough to believe him when he told me that I should consider joining the track team he coached. I was, as we say now, a real indoor cat.
This isn’t entirely true — I loved to ski, and camp, and water-ski. I went on rafting and backpacking trips. But not-being-athletic was the story I told myself about who I was, what I liked, and what my body wanted to do. When I first started “working out” in high school, it was always purely utilitarian and utterly joyless: my internalized millennial fatphobia disciplining me vis-a-vis Jane Fonda step aerobics tapes and the elliptical.
