Free Write Friday: Exercise Equipment


She’s tried gym classes, Jillian Michaels DVDs. She’s run around the track, jogged over wooded trails studded with stones. She’s done two-a-days, eager teens taking turns running drills, hard stops at the line, lifting barbells in the weight room behind the lunch room behind the theater where they held the high school dances. 

She’s bought stretch bands, barbells, balance balls, plastic steps with risers. She found a pull up bar for free on the local mom’s list serve. They buy and sell fancy rain boots and football tickets and ask each other for advice on family-friendly resorts in Zihuatanejo and the best estate planning attorneys and drop-in childcare and ways to get kids involved with climate action and places for Santa photos over the holidays. She fits right in.

She’s taken yoga classes – not hot – that seems unnecessarily suffocating. Spongy mats laid out on the hardwood floor, downward dog and sun salutations with arched backs into flexed toes. Tree pose her favorite: upright and accomplished, easily mastered with her gift of balance and big feet. 

She’s taken pre-dawn boot camps, meeting a group of head-lamped women exclaiming encouragement as they huff up dozens of stairs, breath billowing into the chill morning, sweat trapped under layers of workout gear. She liked having others to exercise with, run hills or jump into burpees, but the classes just weren’t sustainable after having her own children. The other demands of the morning, of harried family life took reign. 

She’s had an online trainer, focused and encouraging but intimidating with her exposed washboard abs. She’d never dieted but for the first time in her life she paid attention to what she ate, limited her junk food, her evening snacking; stopped eating sweets and bags of chips and salsa and glasses of wine whenever she wanted. She stopped indulging in huge bowls of homemade popcorn, puffed and crunchy, doused in hot butter, sprinkled with salt, handfuls melting unceremoniously in her eager mouth, absently stuffed while watching another Netflix episode of Breaking Bad or The Wire or Game of Thrones. She got enough sleep. Felt strong, empowered. 

She’s pushed an unwieldy jogging stroller around the lake, 3.2 miles of sneakers pounding on damp asphalt, muddy gravel, swerving this way and the other to avoid the deep ruts, the many pools of murky water that coalesce after a spring rain. She got to know each curve of the path, each puddle, each turn of season that marked the route like an aging backyard maple, imperceptibly swelling trunk, leaves changing and falling and budding again.

And maybe that’s fitness: fits and starts and seasons and patterns. Lately she’s fallen back into her flesh, into her routine, into her strength and stamina; the muscles build, the mind clears and her body is her own again. 

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Free Write Friday: Track


On rainy days they start in the smaller gym behind the high school, line up on the basketball court for drills: high knees, butt kickers. They stretch into a runner’s lunge as sweat beads inside their hooded polyester tracksuits. 

She heads out with the sprinters for a warm-up run, worn sneakers pounding on the asphalt. Up the street, past the 7-Eleven, winding through trails on the office business complex, then back to the track, powder blue with white accents, modeled after school colors. 

They run drills, the sprint coach standing on the football turf, stopwatch in hand. He shouts instructions, encouragement, critique of form. They stretch and socialize in between. She watches the teenage boys, tries to be nonchalant. Their skin is greasy, awkward bodies too short or too thin. The stench of dysregulated pubescent odor is far enough away to still render them somewhat appealing to her adolescent eye.

On meet days, her stomach churns, she hardly eats. She forces bites of bagels and grocery store fried chicken (someone told her chicken was good: protein) and Power Bars. Sips of Gatorade colored unnaturally green, blue, red make her feel athletic and replenished. Unfortunately, her events are always near the end of the meet. She has to wait in gastrointestinal distress, rushing to and from the bathroom, for the 400 meter dash, the 4 x 400 meter relay. 

Finally her turn, she strolls out to the starting blocks, placed with the stands mercifully behind her. She sets them up to her specifications, right foot back, left foot forward. She checks her spiked shoes, slim white with a neon green detailing and magenta Nike swoop. Her wide feet and long toes always feel overly compressed in the racing shoes, like she is trying to squeeze herself into something that doesn’t quite fit.

The gun sounds and she’s off, pumping arms, cycling legs. She’s ahead going into the first straight away. But they’re staggered, it’s deceiving. She never was good at pacing without someone in front to follow. She always goes out too hard, too fast. She sees opponents emerge from behind her: one, two, three. Heading into the second curve she begins to hear the crowd, their voices register in her ears as one dull roar. As if surfacing from underwater, the wave of sound is suddenly upon her, the cheers. 

Sometimes her dad stands small at the chain link fence, right before the final straight away shouting, “C’mon! C’mon!” She hears his words echo in her head as the lactic acid takes over, rounding the final curve. From behind more emerge: one, two. She slows. Out too fast again, there’s just nothing left to give. 

She keeps moving, somehow, to the finish line, crosses over without her legs giving way. She leans forward, hands on knees, lungs burning, legs screaming with fatigue. The release then comes, a dissolution of tension as the stress, now behind her, lifts. She always thinks after: I could have run faster, could have tried harder, could have given more. 

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Free Write Friday: Treadmill

Someone just wanted it out of their house, a bargain at $100, less than a month’s membership at the local gym. Her husband had been wary; another contraption in the basement? But she was pregnant with her third baby, knew there would be no escaping once this little one came, no time to leave for exercise or much of anything. With three under five, it would be difficult to even make it around the lake with the jogging stroller anymore. So she took up the space, hoping it would run, it would work, it would fit into her new morning routine. 

It’s old, dusty when she first folds it down. The belt is loud, too loud to hear the TV over the grating whir. She winces, hoping it won’t wake up the children, but down in the basement the sound that rises to the second floor must just be a pleasant buzz, converging with the white noise machines in their bedrooms. 

Nothing fancy, no bells, no whistles, but it runs. She starts slow, a brisk walk, but quickly accelerates to jogging pace; no time to dilly dally. Heavy legs pumping, headphones jammed into her ears. She can just barely make out the words from the morning news, the NPR co-host waxing poetic about immigration, about divisive politics, about the latest breaking headline. It’s turned up too loud, probably not good for her ears, she thinks, but the cardiovascular exercise makes up for the auditory damage, right? 

The baby monitor is perched precariously where the magazine should be set. She never understood this: how could someone read while running? It always seemed foolhardy to turn a magazine page while jogging on a moving floor, always seemed impossible to lean in to decipher the miniscule type while working up an active sweat. 

Sometimes she’ll see the baby stirring on the monitor, she’ll hear a whimper from the floor above, children starting to argue over their morning cereal. So she runs faster, picking up the pace: 6.5 mph, 7.0. Must. Finish. Run. She starts sprinting. Sometimes she makes it, finishes the 3 miles before the children take over the morning. Sometimes her preschooler comes down to watch, cozy blankie and pull-up in hand, eager to get his day going. He might play with his cars for a bit, watch her quizzically, examining the contraption that lets her move so much without going anywhere. “Mama, a pulley!” She smiles, nods. Lately he’s been obsessed with finding pulleys everywhere. 

She misses running outside, rain on her face, dodging puddles, watching the seasons change around the nearby lake’s circumferential path. Fellow runners are motivating and she seems to run so much faster when she’s exercising outside. But this, it gets the job done; it gets the endorphins rising before 6 a.m. She gets her daily exercise, the muscles worked, the healthy fatigue. And, a year later, she thinks: this may be the best $100 I’ve ever spent. 

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