Get Off The Treadmill

Get off the treadmill and invite a friend

This post is a story, two stories actually, that lead me to a foundational cornerstone of why “working-out” has become a short road to joy for me! The gold is buried in the story which is why this is a longer post! But it IS gold! J And if you want to know the ending first, scroll to the last four paragraphs.

My journey to fitness equaling joy has often required doing something that wasn’t necessarily in my original plan, or even in my wheelhouse of what I was good at or thought I liked doing.

I went to college to swim, and I LOVED swimming! Practices were the highlight of my day. I loved the feel of the water. I loved being part of a team. I loved the every-day opportunity to dump all my stress and all the thoughts that race around in my head into the pool for a couple hours and just swim until my brain was quiet. I loved swim meets even more. My main races were the 50 free and 100 free—the two shortest, fastest races in swimming. Diving off the blocks, hitting the water and racing down and back at full speed is the closest I’ve ever felt to being able to fly. It was the best!

And then at the start of my sophomore season, I tore the labrums in both of my shoulders from over-training. I came up with every creative solution I could think of to keep swimming and begged my coach to let me try something different while they healed. I told him I would wear fins and kick every yard of every practice with my arms at my side, doing my shoulder exercises every day until they were healed enough to swim normally again. I asked him if I could trade half my yards every day for extra lifting/dry-land/running practices, I offered to do three practices a day, adding a full extra dry-land practice in to make up for all the swimming yards I would miss. ANYTHING to keep swimming and let my shoulders heal.

My coach at the time was a good man but he was not interested in anything outside the norm. In our final meeting he told me, “This swim program isn’t for everyone. You can keep swimming until your shoulders are fully torn and then have surgery, or you can quit.” I was devastated! I’d already seen three of my good friends go through shoulder surgery for the same thing my freshman year and they never swam the same again. By this time I was popping ibuprofen like I was their personal drug rep and still my shoulders were so painful I was only able to wear button-up shirts because it hurt too much to get my arms high enough to pull a shirt on over my head. So with a broken heart and a ton of tears, I left the swim team.

I determinedly decided I was going to do all my exercises, stay in shape, train myself and swim again my junior year. About a week into this plan I was running on a treadmill that overlooked the pool. I’d been running for about 15 minutes, watching tenths of a mile tick off one-by-one at an excruciatingly slow pace and I was miserable! I thought to myself, “I cannot do this for a whole year. I can’t do this for another minute. This is terrible!” I slowed to a walk feeling entirely discouraged and defeated. All my determination to stay fit and be ready for next year seeming to laugh in my face as I realized this was the most miserable thing I could conceive of. (Sounds familiar doesn’t it? “I’m going to get fit!” to “this is terrible, I’d rather watch reruns and eat chips!”)

Then—like one of those thoughts floating by on the air that doesn’t even seem like your own—the thought floated through my head, “what about track?”

And I got off the treadmill.

I ran straight down the stairs—because if I’d paused to think about it I would surely have decided this was crazy and not followed though—and into the track coach’s office (whom I had never met.) He looked up from his paperwork and I said, “hi, my name is Hally. I’ve never run track before in my life, but I’d like to try.” After a very long silence, he said in his gruff voice that I grew to love, “Practice is at 4:00 on the indoor track.” Then he looked back at his papers and said nothing more.

Heart racing, pretty sure I was about to make an ENORMOUS fool of myself I went back to my dorm, grabbed a snack, did a little homework and headed back down the hill to be ready for practice. My first practice was 400 repeats. For those of you who don’t know track, a 400 is one full lap around the track and 400 repeats are laps as fast as you can run with about 15 seconds of rest in-between over and over and over and over… That day the workout wasn’t over until we’d finished 12 x 400’s. Talk about the worst possible first practice!

I was undeniably the slowest person out there. By the 3rd repeat, most of the team had already lapped me, some of them were close to lapping me twice. There had been zero introductions before we’d started—probably because Coach was pretty sure I wouldn’t last—so I knew nobody’s name and they didn’t know mine, but they were kind and funny and shouted encouragements to me every time they lapped me. I was exhausted, feeling like I was about to hurl and yet, surprisingly, my heart was happy and free and feeling hope start to creep back in. It was a night-and-day experience from what I’d been feeling on the treadmill less than two hours earlier.

After practice Coach threw me a jersey and gruffly said, “you’re running the 400 in the meet Saturday.” Then to another girl on the team, “show her the locker next to yours.” This girl gave me a high-five, showed me my locker, let me borrow a towel and shampoo and, over the course of the year, became one of my dearest friends.

I did run the 400 in the meet that Saturday. I lost by a significant, embarrassing margin. I was the slowest person on our team—by a lot. I’m pretty sure I was the slowest runner in our whole conference, but I didn’t keep going back to practice after practice because I was good (or even because I had a glimmer of a hope of being good). I went back day after day because spending time with the track team, very quickly became the highlight of my day. The team was stacked with some of the most wonderful, kind, encouraging people I know. Practices were brutally hard but they were also full of laughter and jokes. Just like swimming, running also became a place where my brain was able to let-go of all the noise and find quiet. Although I NEVER looked forward to running 400 repeats, (dreaded them in fact) I eagerly looked forward to that quiet in my mind and to seeing those friends; friends I wouldn’t otherwise even know.

My experience on the track-team taught me an invaluable lesson that, I believe, is a cornerstone in the foundation of the joy I now find in moving my body. That lesson is: if what you are doing is drudgery, draining the life from you, you might need to shake it up a bit!!! “Get off the treadmill!”

It’s not that I loved the sport of track. Frankly, I didn’t! It was hard and I was terrible at it, but being with those friends and laughing together was worth EVERY SECOND!!! As I look back at it, during those three seasons of running my end goal of staying fit enough to swim again hardly ever crossed my mind. My motivation to keep going back to track practice was the absolute JOY of being with friends and doing something together. It was laughter and friendship that kept me going towards my ultimate goal of “staying fit and healing my shoulders so I could swim again.”

I ended up running the indoor track season, the outdoor track season and the spring cross-country season. I was the slowest person on the team the whole time. I transferred to another college in my junior year and swam both my junior and senior years! I ACTUALLY MET MY GOAL: to stay fit and keep swimming! But I met my goal, not because I gritted my teeth and kept pounding away endless miles on the treadmill, but because I clumsily stumbled into friendship and thus into joy. It was JOY that kept me going, not my determination or even my actual goal.

A more recent example actually just happened this last week. Two of my closest friends bought a weight lifting program from an Australian bodybuilder and invited me to join them. Lifting heavy weights in the part of the gym where all the huge-jacked guys grunt and throw weights around would typically not be my jam. But I seriously looked forward to that workout ALL WEEK because I was going to do it with two of my best friends! I felt so enormously honored and overjoyed that they invited me to join them!! That day came and while we lifted we laughed and talked and I actually ended up surprising myself with how much I enjoyed lifting heavy. A workout I would have totally written off as “not for me” I ended up doing simply for the joy and delight of spending an hour with friends and learned I really like that kind of workout! So you bet that this coming week I am 2x as excited for Tuesday as I was last week because I get to go spend another hour laughing with my friends AND doing something that, as it turns out, I enjoy doing! Shaking it up worked back in college and 10 years later it’s still a good strategy!

A couple years ago I started calling my workouts “moving for joy” instead “going to workout”. It totally shifted my mindset. “Workout” can have such a negative connotation, especially for people who “hate working out.” So don’t go workout. Go move for joy and see if it doesn’t change the game!

If you are in the boat right now where your goals aren’t inspiring you to get moving, maybe it’s time to invite a friend into the mix! Invite a friend to a group fitness class or to go on a long walk or go to the pool and swim. Guess what! You don’t even necessarily have to like the activity you’re going to go do!!!! HOW FREEING IS THAT!!!! Friendship is a JOY ace card, and if you go move with a friend often enough, I can almost guarantee that you’ll end up with a better friend than you started off with and you’ll end up fitter and healthier than you are right now.

So, get off the treadmill. Invite a friend, get brave and go do something you’re not sure about! Worst-case scenario you laugh about it (which is a fantastic core workout by the way!)

Cheers to laughter!

Hally

P.S. I have nothing against treadmills and have discovered some strategies in recent years that get me as excited about treadmills as I get about blue skies and outside trails. J I’ll share those strategies in the coming weeks. Maybe your invite to your friend this week is to go walk on a treadmill side by side.