How Working Out Made Me a Better Writer

I was never an athletic person. I was not fit as a kid. And I mean I was really, really not fit. It is no exaggeration to say that I was dead last or objectively the worst in every single sporting event or activity I participated in as a kid, regardless of the amount of people involved.

Not to say that I participated in a lot of sporting activities. I definitely avoided any sort of game, race, sport etc. I was just not athletic. Never had been and never would be. It’s safe to say my identity was firmly formed as a physically incapable nerd.

In contrast, I’ve always been a good writer. Words make sense to me. Not saying I don’t still have a lot ways I can improve, but I was naturally pretty good without really having to try. Truly in keeping with the highly verbal nerdy girl stereotype, I wanted to write fiction.

I wrote a couple of picture books and short stories in middle school, and then I decided to write a novel.

To the shock of no one but perhaps myself, it was harder than I thought it would be. Try as I might, I could not get anything I wrote to be nearly as good as the things I loved to read. (This is in fact very normal for a first book.)

Writing slowly became a source of fear for me. I was so frustrated that I couldn’t get it the way I wanted it that I basically stopped. Every few months I would pick a story back up, only to quit again.

Then I went to college, read and wrote a bunch for school, got distracted by love and friends and wrote very, very little outside of school.

But I did start working out. I went to the gym very sporadically in college, and let me tell you, it was not easy. I very distinctly remember walking in one time, looking around, getting overwhelmed, and walking right back out after just a few minutes. I even had a fear of treadmills.

My expectations for what I could do in the gym were absolutely rock bottom. All I wanted to do was lose a bit of weight and have more energy. But never in a million years did I imagine that I would come to love it, and even get good at it.

So, despite how nervous it made me, I kept going. I wasn’t disappointed in myself for only being able to run a few minutes at a time, or for struggling to curl 5lbs, because that was about all I expected from myself.

Then the pandemic happened, and I had a bunch of extra time on my hands and as one of the few people who remained on campus, access to a very empty track.

And I started running. And it was fun. I didn’t care about going fast, or running for long. I just ran to the beat of my music. When the beat picked up, I picked it up, and when it was chill, I was chill. It just felt like dancing.

Then before I knew it I could run a mile without stopping.

A bunch of other stuff happened that would be too long to go into detail about, but basically, I built a very consistent workout habit and a lot of my friends did as well.

And while it wasn’t easy, it also wasn’t stressful.

On Oct 7th, I ran my first 5k. I was hoping to get sub 35 mins. And I ran 30:50, right under 10 minutes per mile. Faster than I had ever run before in my life.

I had no idea I would be able to do this. Even a couple days before the race, I was selling myself short on what my body was capable of, because my identity had been so rooted in the fact that I was an unatheltic person.

Now, to connect this back to writing.

My relationship to writing has been pretty much the inverse to my relationship to working out. It came easy to me, and I expected greatness from myself in my writing And when I didn’t achieve greatness, I got frustrated. I had an unrealistic view of what I would be able to achieve as a new writer.

Last year I finally finished a first draft of a novel, and I am currently working on the second draft (more of a second first draft, but that’s a story for another time).

And let me tell you, that was painful. But I was in the process of changing. From someone who thought she would be the way she always was to someone who knows that with enough time and enough effort she can change even the most fundamental parts of herself.

I also let go of my high expectations for writing. I’m not trying to write my best novel anymore. Yes, I am trying to write to the best of my current abilitity, but I now know, and actually believe, that the best of my current abilitity is not the best of my potential.

And that is an incredibly freeing place to be.