If you've kept up with this long enough, you know that I keep changing the focus of this blog.
Hey, guess what? This is another one of those changes.
Recently, I've begun working out with REAL consistency. I've been doing the Couch to 5K program and Camp Gladiator for a few weeks now. (If I was fancy, those would show up as hyperlinks, but I forget how to do that.) I can't outrun all the zombies or punch all the werewolves in the face....yet...but I feel better than I have in I-don't-know-how-long.
A little bit of backstory here: I've never been an athlete, thought of myself as being athletic, or been thought of as being athletic. In fact, I was teased pretty badly as a kid for not being good at kickball, soccer, softball, tetherball...you get the idea. (I was pretty good at dodgeball, because, frankly, it made sense: if a foreign object is flying at you at top speed, YOU GET OUT OF THE WAY.) P.E. was not a good time, except for on rainy days when we watched After School Specials. (There was also that great equalizer, square dancing. Even the coolest kids couldn't make THAT look cool.)
By the time I was a teenager, I was apathetic towards fitness and sports and the like. I bought into that whole adolescent clique-y mentality, even while insisting that I hated cliques. The "jocks" didn't like me. I didn't like them. It seems stupid now, but it was what it was.
What changed? I don't really know for sure. I tried "working out" at different points in my 20s, but I never really felt like I knew what I was doing, or that there was a real point to all, and I didn't have the peer motivation that I have now. Maybe that's what changed. I got older, and all those stupid little differences that seem so important when you're fifteen just don't matter when you're thirty. I met people who had changed themselves for the better, for whom being in shape was a part of that change. And some of those people had my same geeky interests.
Which leads me to my new blog focus: I've realized that I can be physically fit AND still be my unique, quirky self. I don't have to buy into stereotypes about "nerds" and "jocks". That seems like such an obvious statement to make, but really,when you think about it, those stereotypes can be powerful things.
So you'll probably see a lot more of me fusing health/fitness stuff with other things that I geek out on (Simpsons, zombies, books, music, books, movies...did I mention books?) Hopefully, the consequences will be amusing (at least to me). BTW: I'm open to suggestions regarding new health foods, workouts, etc. to try. Could make for some good blogging.
