Food and Fitness for Living Better

Fitness should be fun. It is an opportunity to move your body in a way that feels right to you. 

For me, fitness has changed over the years and with the seasons. I run in the summer and fall, I ski in the winter and early Spring, I recover from running after training for a long race. I bulk in the winter as I build muscle, then I run it all off playing soccer come spring. I swam in the winter and ran cross country in the fall. I stopped swimming in high school to focus on academics; I started playing water polo in college so I wasn’t taking academics so seriously anymore. I asked on of the guys in my dorm to build me a strength training program. I learned to barbell squat with a girl from my water polo team. I shared late night workouts in the gym with my best friends in college. I embraced yoga during the pandemic when I had lots of extra alone time. I have continued running since I started, although the annual mileage has swung by a few hundred miles. I’ve tracked every step since getting my Garmin in 2016. I learned the satisfaction of cycling when we lived in Wisconsin with flat straight roads, but switched to mountain biking with my fiance when we moved to Connecticut. I discovered trail running is actually easier for me on those same trails than mountain biking. I ran my first ultramarathon while training for my first marathon. I am in a relentless pursuit of experiencing new ways to move my body and proving my body is capable of doing them all.

Of course there are activities I don’t enjoy as much, and it’s likely because I never dedicated the practice to improve at them. Softball, basketball, and dancing are all activities I am not at all comfortable doing. For some reason they just feel wrong to me, and that’s okay. So I don’t do them! I have plenty of other activities on my list to keep me more than active enough. 

I hope you have found your passions for movement. If you haven’t, explore something new here! Be open to trying something new and not worrying if you are good enough at it. Maybe I should take my own advice and revisit some of those activities that are unappealing to me 🙂