Let me start by telling you a story. It’s one of a tall, scrawny boy of extreme awkwardness who, despite his theories of being switched at birth, found himself in a small southern town and a heavily sports-centered high school where physical fitness was almost coveted.
Athleticism and coordination were about as foreign to this boy as fat-free butter is to Paula Dean. World of Warcraft, band drum line and anticipating the next installment of the Harry Potter movies (along with crafting his own fan theories) took up most of his spare time.
So you can imagine the scene of terror when he was required to work out with the football players as part of his PE credit. Pure outrage. He marched all the way (down the two hallways that made up his school) to the office and demanded that his constitutionally protected rights as a citizen had been somehow grossly infringed upon.
After laying out his well-structured case filled with sound reasoning and alternative activity options, the school administrator chuckled (adding fuel to the fire) and said, “You’re at a private school, son. Go to football workout.” So the boy went, and for a semester he gave a feeble attempt to lift even the smallest of weights.
If you haven’t figured it out yet (or didn’t know that I have a level 80 Dwarf shadow priest that used to pwn noobs on the weekends), the boy in this little tale was me in 2007.
In 2015 I’m just as scrawny, tall and miserably uncoordinated, (along with a little bitter about being forced to workout with football players) but I have since grown up a little bit. I have begun to workout again and this time it is my own choosing.
I guess I just have a new outlook on it now. No, I didn’t have some divine calling or an epiphany.
Personal wellness is something I have always taken for granted and for so long I despised the idea of “being in shape” because to me it meant being like everyone else. But now I see it as an outlet to become more me than ever before.
Training your body allows you to discover abilities you never knew you had. For instance, since starting this workout experience I have discovered muscles I never knew existed (or even the slightest clue how to move them).
There are some days I am so sore that I can barely roll out of bed and I look up the stairs to my apartment and weep. And there are days that I seriously question why I decided to do this to myself.
Through the soreness and self-doubt I learned that it’s not about proving to other people how strong you are or how many abdominal workouts you can do a week.
Personal wellness is, quite literally, about feeling good in your own skin.
And when I start to get down on myself about the very minimal amount of weight I can lift I always tell myself: everyone has to start somewhere.
