Confessions

I have a confession to make: I hated PE.

Yep, you read that correctly—the person who now loves to exercise once hated it. Despised it actually. The person who relishes the chance to strength train, to run, to push her body to its limits once avoided doing so like the plague. So much so that I lobbied (successfully) to substitute a semester of PE in order to take a marine biology class my junior year of high school.

But, one must also take into consideration the fact that I also substituted a season of soccer for the final semester of my PE requirement. So, maybe it wasn’t exercise that I hated but exercise in the format of a conventional high school physical education class.

Why did I hate PE? Plain and simple: I was a shy, slightly overweight, out of shape teenager who didn’t know how to play any sport, who wasn’t fast and could not throw any sort of ball with even a slight bit of skill even if her life depended upon it. The more “athletic” kids intimidated me and I lacked the confidence to step out of my comfort zone and just give things a try. My family did not place emphasis on health and fitness; we weren’t sports people. I played basketball and T-ball in second grade and that was the last organized team sport I was part of until my sophomore year of high school. Why, you may ask. Well, basically my family’s time was consumed with work and with another time consuming activity: 4-H (more on that in later post I’m certain). I come from hard working stock: as a farmer’s daughter early to rise, late to bed, work your bum off all day was not a foreign concept to me. I learned young that if I was to achieve my goals then work was required. And I had lofty goals even as a young child as I knew from age seven that I WAS going to be a veterinarian. I wasn’t lazy. Rather, it was the notion of living a healthy lifestyle that was foreign.

What changed my mind–my view–of exercise? Quite plainly a series of unfortunate events. In the late winter of my junior year of high school I injured my knee. More exactly, one of my sheep injured my knee. Amazingly, when the head of a 200 pound ram running at full speed hits the side of your knee something has to give. In my case, what gave were the ligaments supporting the inside of my knee. Over the course of the next couple months I transition from crutches and a stiff  knee brace to the stiff brace alone then to an articulated brace and finally to physical therapy. It was through physical therapy that I learned exercise had the potential to be not just a requirement at school but rather something you could do to improve yourself, something that was fun. My physical therapist encouraged me to increase my activity level to strengthen the muscles around my knee and that is when I started to run not because I had to but because I wanted to.  It wasn’t fun at first, but with time I realized it could be.  I quickly found that the difference between running a distance in PE and doing on your own was that I was competing against no one but myself.  

Fast forward to the spring that very same year when running took on a whole new meaning in my life. I remember the day vividly: I was laying on the floor of my bedroom doing homework when a phone call came through. It was a friend informing me that our friend Rob had been killed in a head-on collision. Rob was two years ahead of us in school and had joined the Navy after graduation. He was in Florida for training to be a submarine nuclear engineer. He was more than just a friend but rather the closest thing I had to a brother. Over the next few months I would learn that the grief emanating from the sudden loss of a very close friend could be utterly paralyzing. Prior to this, I had experienced the death of family members (my grandma) and other adults (family friends and my 4-H leader) but each experience had been after the person suffered a prolonged illness.  In each situation I had time to process the loss over the course of many many months PRIOR to their death. Never had I experienced the sudden loss of anyone close to me. As I continued my physical therapy, including running, I began to realize they were solace and relief to be found in those activities.

Running became my source of stress relief. It became my “alone time” to be with my thoughts and contemplate life. As I struggled to grasp the unfairness of life. As I struggled to deal with being an “outlier” at school. As I struggled to figure out where I was going in life. Later, in college, I would find that if I I was having difficulty finishing a writing assignments that ideas would flow freely while running. It also became a way for me to deal with the anxiety that would become my nemesis in college and beyond.

Truth be told, running also took an unhealthy place in my life as well. I had struggled with body image issues in high school (that will happen when kids call you “fat cow” and other not-so-nice names). Combine that pathologic psychology with the deep depression I entered following Rob’s death and it was a perfect storm for an eating disorder. I denied it for years. As I felt that my life was spinning out of control eating was the one thing in my life I could control. The kid who once would sit on the couch and eat way too many Doritos while watching TV after school had morphed into a calorie-counting exercise freak. But more on that dark period of my life at a later time.

As I look at our nation as a whole and see how the obesity epidemic is sucking the life from us I pause to think back to my long ago dislike of exercise. One of my favorite TV shows is My 600 Pound Life. I am an amateur student of sociology and psychology and this show intrigues me. Episode after episode I see the same script play out: people who have faced trial and tragedy in their lives choose a destructive way to deal with it. My way of dealing with tragedy in my younger years was also destructive, but in a different way. I often think back to the teenage me and wonder how I could have better handled the situation I faced without having to go into my dark place . My mind mulls over how I’ve arrived at a better place in my relationship with food and exercise and the answer is clear: seeking the Lord and the help of a Christian counselor. There is so much back story to this…yet another subject that is too much to cover now. When all is said and done, it wasn’t until I let down my guard, discarded my pride, opened up my heart and let His love shine into my dark places that I found true healing from loss, true healing from the bullying I had endured in high school, true release from needing to be a people pleaser, true release from the clutches of the enemy and his misguided whispers into my soul, true restoration of peace within my life.

Now, running has a new life in my life. Rather than running to get away from it all I’m running to draw myself closer to the Lord and those around me. There is a great deal of community to be found within the sport of running: connections to be made, support to be given to those who share the love. I’ve taken a major step outside my comfort zone and joined a program called “Love the Run Your With”, which is organized by the women’s running group Another Mother Runner (www.anothermotherrunner.com). As I close this post my mind is already jumping ahead to the next item on my list for the day: heading out for an interval run that hundreds of other participants across the world are also doing. I look forward to the challenges this program will present as I learn new ways to better my health and fitness, new ways to connect with other women around the world. A soft smile comes across my face as I think how far I’ve come over the past twenty plus years. The road has been rough and included many dark valleys but the journey has been worth every tear shed.