Striving to Strive Less in 2023?

I’m starting off 2023 a little sluggish. I haven’t been sleeping well the last week or so, have stayed up too late celebrating with friends and family, and haven’t had a lot of time to myself. So I’m feeling a little out of sorts and ready to get back to equilibrium.

But what is equilibrium for me now?

Certainly not what it was at the start of 2022. I’m way more kinder and gentler on my body. I listen to it more, take time off for it more, especially when it comes to exercise.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my complicated relationship with exercise, especially over the last month.  

In early December, Hubs casually mentioned he had been looking at my mountain biking mileage stats for the year on Strava (a fitness tracking and social app that most of our fellow riders use) and noted I was maybe 60 miles shy of a round number like 1,500 miles. Just a few days after that, I got my Year in Sport from Strava, a recap of my year’s activities from a variety of data points, including hard-core fitness stats but also fun social stats like my top photos. We overly competitive (and slaves-to-the-data) types await the Year in Sport so we can see how we stacked up against our fellow overzealous achievers but mostly ourselves. And somewhat insidiously, it keeps rolling through the end of the year, so if you don’t like where you are in early December, you have time to really amp it up. 

Normally, Hub’s comment and Strava’s recap would have spurred me into action for the remaining days of the year, and believe me, I felt the pull to put on mountain biking shoes and load up the bike more than once, but I’m also in a different place now and actively questioning my need to exercise and overachieve, particularly athletically. I’m also working to find a balance between “joyful movement,” the intuitive eating terminology for exercise, and the never-take-a-day-off mentality that used to rule me.  

I’ve had a complicated relationship with exercise for a long time. It would be easier if I could just say I used exercise for weight control, which of course I did, but it’s much more complicated than that. I genuinely love to exercise, especially outdoors. It’s my reset time, my zone out time, my think things through time, my slay demons time … basically my everything time. I can’t imagine exercise not being a part of my life. 

I am also highly competitive, and physical activity has also been my primary means of challenging myself. That sounds positive, but there is a darker undercurrent beneath that statement. I have used athletic striving and achievement as a means of validating myself for most of my life. This is because I didn’t think I was ever good enough just as I was, especially in my body. I had to achieve in order to prove to myself that I mattered.

The only way to make it ok was if I was strong and capable of difficult things, so I took up sports like Olympic lifting and mountain biking. I trained year-round and almost never took a day off. I trained when I was sore and bone tired. I trained buzzed and, even worse, hungover. I trained when I had the flu at least twice. I got on stages and lifted heavy things in front of audiences to prove that I was worthy. I completed one of the gnarliest mountain bike rides in all of Texas with less than six months of riding under my belt for bragging rights. 

I have dug deep within myself and committed to doing things that absolutely scared me, things I wasn’t sure I was capable of, and there is something to be celebrated about that. In fact, there is a lot to celebrate about striving and achieving and overcoming obstacles, be they mental, emotional or physical. And I still have that drive within me. I just don’t know how to do it in a healthy way yet.

So I wrestled with myself this December over whether I should care what my stats were and whether I should try to set some last-minute goals just for the fun of it. With a few more hours and extra workouts, for example, I could have easily surpassed my 2021 mountain biking mileage. But every time I contemplated it, there was another voice inside me, asking “Would this really be serving me?” A few weeks probably wouldn’t have significantly improved my fitness, but I worried that the quick uptick in calories burned might negatively impact my metabolism or lead me back into restrictive eating patterns. What I didn’t want was a few 3- or 4-hour workouts to cause my body to panic and think it was entering famine times again. So I skipped the competition for no reason and just did the activities I felt like doing, which ended up being a few easy bike rides and hikes. 

I finished 2022 very close to the activity level I had in 2021, which is to say still very active. I was also in the top 5% of most-active people on Strava. I would be lying if I said the stats didn’t matter to me. 

Maybe at the end of 2023 I won’t care about the numbers, how many miles I’ve logged, how many days I’ve worked out, how many activities I’ve completed in relation to everyone else who is doing that same thing. But closing out the first day of the year, I took pride in knowing that I went outside in the sunshine and rode my bike over the rolling trails near my house  … and logged my first ride of the year.