I have never been an athlete. Mind you, I have been active a lot of my life, with ballet, gymastics, yoga, aikido... the list is long.
I am fast becoming a fan of running, though. Aikido is fun; dancing is fun; but running makes me feel powerful.
It's a funny thing, feeling that way. I am very much a creature of the mind, and not of the body. I could cite all sorts of feminist theories, about not playing enough soccer as a child; about anorexic models giving me a negative body image; about maybe feeling, in the back of my head, that being weak was feminine. In many cases, this may even be true, but in mine, it's dead wrong.
I'm fortunate to have been raised in a way almost blind to traditional gender roles (thanks, mom!). I can change out the innards of a toilet. I can move furniture by myself. I can squish bugs and take out the trash. I can also give myself a good manicure and spend hours in a bubble bath with a trashy romance novel. But I see no conflict there; I am who I am, and when I do the things that I do, I'm just, well, being myself.
So in my case, being inactive is not a matter of feeling it's somehow unladylike or inappropriate. It's not The Man keeping me down, yo. If anything, it's that I'm so preoccupied with other things that it doesn't occur to me. Go run? With no Internet connection? No news feed? Nothing to read?
Call it an information vacation, then. A respite from the data overclocking I subject myself to, all day, every day.
I went running tonight, and I felt strong. I felt powerful. I felt like I was just a little bit more alive than I had been before. I liked it. I'm still not an athlete. I'll never participate in the Olympics. But maybe I can become one. Life is full of strange twists.
My kitchen is: Clean! Knives drying on the sink, dishwasher needs running, but otherwise we're in good shape. Wonderful what a solid 15 minutes can do for a kitchen.
Posted by andrea at February 26, 2003 10:52 PMYou're welcome. My pleasure, even. Do you remember when I used to run, when we lived in California and the Philippines? I loved running. I preferred to run on quarter-mile tracks because then I didn't need to think about traffic, routes, or pedestrians. I could be alone, and just focus on whatever I wanted to. I could make my body run, and I was completely free from anything else. I used to use the excuse of a run just to run, not because I needed to run to practice for my annual aerobics test. I was running a mile and a half in 14 minutes, the Air Force standard for an 18 year old...and I was 34 then. So I know what you mean. I really do. More power to ya, kid!
Posted by: cathyy on February 28, 2003 10:44 PM