It seems like so long ago that we were back at school and everything was normal. It’s felt like we have been in a pandemic forever. I know we all try and repress the terrible memories we have from those first weeks of quarantine in the cold and dreary months of March and April. I look back on those days and realize I had accidentally gotten myself into really good shape. Following an awesome exercise streak, I then lost a lot of the motivation I originally had. But I have since come to terms with how I did both, and why both are okay.
When I first got sent home from school, I went back to work, but my parents soon made me stop. With no work and no ability to hang out with anyone, I was left with very few options to cure my boredom.
In between classes and scrolling through TikTok for hours, I found myself filling my days with long workouts to make them go by faster. I have always been a runner and exercising has always been a part of my routine, but my runs had never succeeded more than four or five miles. However, once I realized that the longer my run was, the longer I would be out of my house and away from the scary reality of a pandemic, I started to indulge in long runs around my hometown that usually amounted between eight and ten miles. I would come back and watch YouTube videos of ab circuits, and work up a big sweat in my basement. And even after eating, showering, and doing some homework, I would end my day by walking my dog while listening to music or a podcast.
This became a routine I started to stick to for the next couple of months. What started as some simple strategies to make my days go by became a groove that I continued each and every day. I started to speed up my paces on my runs and lengthen my core workouts. I was very much getting “quaren-toned”, and it was quite exciting. My long runs and walks became my favorite parts of my day.
Around the same time, I started working again, and I also enrolled in a summer math class that required a lot of my attention. This new busy schedule left limited time to start up my exercising again, and even when I ended my break, I didn’t return to the level I had ended it on. When I had time in between everything, I found myself too tired to do anything but lay around. I fell into a bit of a rut with running and struggled a lot during most runs. For the rest of the summer, my runs were more spread out instead of every day, and they were shorter and slower paced. So I guess you could say during this time I became out of shape, and lost what I had built during the beginning months of quarantine regarding my exercise abilities. And for a while, I had trouble dealing with this fact. I felt really guilty about not working out considering I had previously been so good about it. I was so proud of myself for utilizing the beginning of quarantine for good and getting into such good shape, and then I was so upset with myself for being lazy and losing it.
