I have a confession to make. I used to hate exercise (quelle surprise!). I’m sure I’m not alone in the way that even thinking about lifting a set of dumbbells can bring out the cold sweats, not to mention the sounds of the dreaded school Beep Test (pure nightmare fuel if you ask me). So as soon as I could escape the obligation of high school gym class, I avoided anything above a leisurely walk like the plague. It wasn’t the healthiest idea, but then again, neither is high school gym class. But this isn’t going to be a blog post about how to steer clear of lifting, squatting, or crunching. This is going to be a post about beginning by accident, all the dumb mistakes you can make along the way, how to avoid them, and how to embrace exercise in the way only a newly enthusiastic amateur can.

The thing is exercise had never been fun, so there wasn’t any enthusiasm to be found in doing it. It always had a grade tied to it, and I don’t know about you, but the scrutiny of grades wasn’t the best motivator for someone who was a chronic weakling and a perfectionist (and on some days, still is). What I did enjoy was getting lost in a good story. Enter Zombies, Run! from the ether. Somehow, I stumbled onto this little phone app which, besides being an exciting, interactive podcast of mystery and drama wrapped up in a post-apocalyptic, zombie-infested England, was also an app that weaved its storytelling into fitness. Once the story begins and cuts into your favorite gym jams, you are told you are Runner 5. You are also a recent survivor of a helicopter crash that puts you on the outskirts of what someone on the radio called Sam Yao tells you is Abel Township. His earnest and sometimes awkward guidance brings you safely through zombie territory (with a few pulse-raising notifications of being chased by a hoard of undead, so pick up the pace!) and through the gates to meet the rich world of one of the last remaining survivor compounds on Earth (that somehow is also home to the Margaret Atwood? I’m still not sure how they managed to land that big a cameo). By the time I heard the soon-to-be-familiar sound of Abel’s gate sirens for the first time, I found that I was more than ready to keep going to gobble up more of the story, despite having already run five kilometers. The only thing that stopped me was the fact that as a first-time runner, my legs had started to protest that they’d done more work than they ever had since that dang Beep Test and would rather wait another two weeks before going out on another five-kilometer journey.

Enter my first and biggest fitness taboo. I developed (or probably always had) an aversion to stretching. Post forty-minute run, stretching was the last thing I wanted to do, anyway, and after you finish a good workout, you can sometimes feel like you don’t need it. I quickly learned that this is your body lying to you. Take it from someone that who gave herself shin splints twice from skipping the calf part of leg day, you always need to stretch. I did eventually learn that after a long run stretching is lazy work in comparison, especially if you take a page out of Susan E. Clark’s The Lazy Person’s Guide to Exercise. If all you want to do is flop down on the couch after spending a good half-hour pounding pavement, Clark’s made an illustrated, easy-step stretching guide that you can use without ever leaving your seat, along with a series of exercises that are best-place-in-the-house friendly. There’s also information on the benefits of each stretch so that you don’t get any bad ideas about skipping out on the most important part of any workout. But if you’d like something more in-depth and matches the energy of your high-intensity gym session, try checking out 1,500 Stretches by Hollis Liebman. If there’s a sore knee that needs a little TLC, or maybe you tweaked a shoulder in just the wrong way, there’s a stretch for you and probably some others you hadn’t thought about. Liebman targets each part of the body with such intense detail that you might feel like a whole new person if you choose to do all 1,500! Plus, if you need a reminder of why stretching is important, there are about 10 different reasons tucked into the front of the book.

The next big fitness faux pas I committed was my deep lack of diversity. You only need to do a quick Google search to figure out how bad an idea that is, but I stuck with only running for months. To give you a quick CliffsNotes version, doing a variety of exercises is good for you because, like many things, if you do the same thing over and over again, you acclimate. Little did I know at the time, just like your brain, your body can also get bored. Changing things up helps the muscles that keep you going stay flexible and springy to avoid injury and also has countless benefits for your brain. I’m still shaking my head at the un-wisdom of my less-experienced self. But once I got a little smarter about things and after my hard-earned lessons about stretching, I found myself venturing into the world of yoga. The great thing about it is you can go at any pace that suits your mood and energy once you learn the basic moves, and it’s surprisingly quick to catch onto, being only a little more complicated than your usual stretching. Foundational Yoga Flow will set you up perfectly for eventually striking it out on your own, with breakdowns of the building blocks that make any rejuvenating practice. Once you’ve mastered shavasana and cat/cow, you can also use this book as a level-up companion for expert balancing poses that will truly test how strong you’ve become (and if you really want to push your boundaries, might I suggest a high-intensity Pilates session? Get some weights, a few books, or search YouTube for an instructor and you don’t even have to leave the comfort of your own home to break a good sweat).  

My third and final fitness oopsie I can’t take full blame for. Some things just don’t come up in high school gym class, one of them being the shocking fact that most of what you do in the gym is often overshadowed by what you do in the kitchen (a roughly 20 to 80 percent split). This doesn’t just go for weight loss but also for maintaining healthy muscle mass or reaching any other athletic goal you might have in mind. While I can’t say I have a very meat-heavy and protein-forward taste, I did need to make some changes to make sure I wasn’t taking a quick snooze on the sidewalk every time I put on my running shoes. Thankfully the world of athletic gastronomy has expanded to include pretty much any kind of diet under the sun while also being mindful of the vitamins and nutrients you’ll need to carry you through your day, workout or not. The Runner’s World Vegetarian Cookbook is chock-full of just that, offering alternatives to some favorite dishes in time-friendly recipes that make it easy to choose based on whatever you happen to need. I don’t know about you, but the less brainwork I need to do after a long workday or gym trip is a win in my book. Plus, the smoky squash flatbread, apple cheddar grilled cheese and maple pepitas look too good to pass up, even if you’re not vegetarian or a gym regular.     

Besides diet, stretching, and the everything else, the best thing to do for beginner and expert athletes alike is to get enough rest and well-earned downtime. For me, of course, that’s curling up with a good book, so I’d be remiss if I didn’t offer you a side helping of fiction to fill in the story-shaped void that Zombies, Run! may have left you with if you decide to try it out. Zombie Apocalypse Running Club takes all the great things about the phone app and turns them into a read with a perfectly snippy, sharp narrator and a band of colorful companions in training to survive the end of the world- or outrun it. So much of Eira’s experience with running feels real to what learning really felt like (and sometimes still does). I was instantly sucked into her side of the apocalypse because, like misery, soreness loves company. Throw in the mystery of her coach Racer’s missing brother (who may or may not already be dead) and the most important run of any of their lives (which is saying something, considering the zombie-infested wasteland) and you’ve got the makings of a read that will keep you in your seat, as you should be after you’ve stretched.    

Now that the weather is finally turning around for the better, I think it’s about time for me to lace up my sneakers and hit the pavement, and hopefully, I’ll see some of you on the road. As Sam Yao likes to say, stay safe out there! Until next time!