Milestone

I've never been a fitness person. That is the understatement of the year. I blame it on my history as a dancer. For 20 years, physical activity was built into my life in a way that I didn't recognize it as fitness. Going to ballet class or leading dance team practice was routine. It was part of my schedule growing up and part of my academic life at Hamilton. I never had to decide to go to dance - I just went.

As an adult, with a full plate of work and life, you have to decide to go to the gym. In NYC, I could swing by one of many available hip hop cardio classes at the gym on my way home from work. The instructors were amazing choreographers and the classes were high energy, thought provoking, and sweat inducing fun. Because...New York. When we moved to Boston, I never found that (I, um, also didn't look very hard) but I was also walking about two miles a day on my commute to the office.

When we moved to Portsmouth, I replaced those walking miles with driving miles. Many driving miles. I never figured out how to integrate the gym into my daily routine. At the same time, my previously enviable metabolism decided to stop being enviable. It was time to face the music. While I still haven't been able to get there on days I commute to Boston, I do my best to go to the gym when I work from home. Believe it or not, I've started to enjoy the treadmill and actually, just a few weeks was able to run a ten-minute mile without stopping.

For many, that would be a walk in the park, but I'm proud of reaching that milestone (pun!). I will never be a long-distance runner given the crummy knee, and I will likely never be able to run much farther or faster more than that, but it feels good to know I can do it.