What I Tell Myself When I Work Out

I've been gaining and losing the same four pounds for about 6 months now, which is pretty frustrating. But until I manage to stop myself from eating Nutella straight from the jar, and icing off of stale red velvet cake, and any other sweet thing I can find at night, I guess I'll continue to get the same results.

The positive thing is, I'm cardiovascularly fitter than I've ever been before. If my Turbo Kick class was offered at times that better suited my work schedule, I'd take it more than once a week. I am in love with that class. It's fun, challenging, empowering. Every time I work my ass off, literally dripping with sweat, I swear that I'll quit sabotaging myself with food.

My food issues are something I am still working out, obviously. In the meantime, I remind myself that I go to the gym for reasons other than weight. I go because it's time for me. I go because it's time to decompress. I go because it's better than therapy, or drugs, or alcohol. I go because I feel lighter, sexier, stronger, saner.

I talk to myself on the machines. Doesn't everyone? Not aloud, of course. I don't want to be that woman. But while I glide and run and pedal and lift, I tell myself things. Here's a list:

You can DO this.
You're strong.
You're stronger than you think you are.
You're pure energy.
Just one more hill.
Just five more minutes.
You're awesome.
You rock.
Breathe.
Drop your shoulders.
Tighten your core.
Good posture.
You can DO this. (I repeat this one because I say it a lot.)

I wish I talked to myself with such positive affirmations all the time! I've come a long way, though, through the years. I am mostly happy with myself, something I would have felt hard to believe if you'd told me when I was 17, or 21, or 25. I've been hearing a phrase a lot lately, from different sources: You gotta do the work. I believe it, sister! I'm doing it. I'm gonna keep on doing it until I get there.

Run

I apparently have a new theme song. It's called "Run" by one of my favorite musicians, Kathleen Edwards. I can't stop listening to it. It makes me want to throw on my sneakers, throw open the door, and just go. It's about a woman who's running in the night, after she's put her kids to bed.

I would run down the lane And into the night/Run so fast I swear my feet would fly/Run from my babies asleep in their beds/Run from my lover and my best friend/And back again

I understand this song in my bones, even though I am currently childless. This woman is carving out a space for herself to just be who she is, time to not be a mother or wife in that moment. And because she loves her children and her partner, she comes back. When I run (or get on that elliptical trainer, or walk, or lift weights) I am just me. I'm not Ms. Laila, the storytime lady, and I'm not Laila, the wife, or Laila the daughter. I love being all of these things, but at some level I also want to be me - the woman who is in the midst of what feels like a profound life changing time. I am running not away from my family or friends, but towards the woman I want to become.

I can see her in my mind. She's strong, sexy, confident, powerful. She is alive, a fighter. She knows all the crazy horrible things in this world that can break her heart wide open, and she says, So be it. I can still love life, create art, have fun, love myself and love my loved ones in the face of all that's broken with this world.

But the smell of the world came into my lungs/The sound of the gravel when my legs went numb/And my heart nearly burst right out of my chest/And it felt so good to know I wasn't dead/

When I run, I don't fly like a slight, skinny bird. I tend to plod, and sweat, and gasp. I am a woman of some substance, you might say. But there are moments when my heart's pounding that I come close to feeling a sort of flight, a certain sweet distance from everyday experience. The more I run the more I realize that my body does what it wants to; some days I can run, and some days I just walk, and that's okay. Either way I feel more alive, like every moment is a chance to be made new.

Forward.

For pretty much all of my life, I've held ideas about myself - about what I could and couldn't do, about who I was and who I wasn't. All they've done is hold me back. As I was running at the gym yesterday, I thought, 'It's only taken me thirty-two and a half years to start finding out who I really am! How lucky for me!'

I ran and walked in intervals for 3.1 miles - a treadmill 5K. I was slow. I didn't care. I felt absolutely alive - sweaty, gasping, shuffling along. Ever since middle school gym, when the mile run portion of the Presidential Fitness Test scarred me for life, I've resisted running. It's so intense, this experience of a racing heart, burning lungs, and jostled joints. I am confronted by my fears and by the way I limit myself, compare myself to everyone else. The list of reasons why I'm not a "real runner" is long. I can't be a real runner because:

I'm too slow. I'm too fat. Too old. I wear glasses. I don't have the right shoes, clothes, mp3 player. I don't know the right way to breathe. I don't like being cold. Or wet. Or hot. I don't like wearing shorts. I don't wear a watch, or a heart rate monitor. I don't drink sport drinks. I don't shop at Runner's Market.

I could go on.

Running scares me partly because I'm afraid of getting hurt, and writing scares me pretty much for the same reason. But the more I write, the more I want to do other things that frighten me. I am somehow pushing up against myself, meeting my mind's resistance and punching holes in it, slowly.

In the spirit of "Why Not?", I am running a 5K race in six weeks. I have creaky knees, tight hamstrings, a twitchy back, a big butt. I still don't think of myself as a runner. I wonder if that will change when I cross the finish line. Sometimes I tell myself, just put one foot in front of the other. Just get down one word, one sentence, one paragraph. Moving forward, as slowly as I need to go, I figure I'll meet myself on down the road.