Pull Shapes
Pull Shapes
During the pandemic, my boyfriend and I bought an exercise bike. It was more for mental health than physical health at the time, but seeing my daily step count diminish to three digits in those early months was certainly a motivating factor.
I won’t recount just how badly the pandemic hit New York in 2020 and the particular eeriness that blanketed the city for months. Despite some false starts to “normal” and plenty of cautious toe-dipping throughout 2021, the city and those of us who live here didn’t fully look or feel like ourselves again until 2022. By then, I emerged as a thirty-eight-year-old. The remainder of my mid-thirties came and went in isolation, and now I was inching toward forty, seemingly, overnight.
Once we were able to go out and be active again, the exercise bike sat largely unused. I developed a very low-level routine for a while, but hardly anything called a regimen, and certainly not one that would put me in the best shape of my life.
This phrase - “the best shape of my life” - is one I sometimes heard from friends and family around the time they turned forty. I’d start seeing social media posts documenting workout progress and personal goals and hashtags like #bestby40. Things like that. As far as I can tell, most of them have remained committed to that goal. I know a lot of healthy and self-care-conscious forty- and fifty-somethings.
I’m now writing this from the other side of forty. Nearly forty and a half if you want to get technical. By my mid-thirties, I had started thinking of aging in a very surface-level way. Drink more water, add a decent retinol to nightly skincare, maybe don’t eat a block of cheese right before bed. Normal stuff. Wanting an exercise bike during my least mobile year made sense too, but I wasn’t thinking about it in terms of combating the realities of aging. I’m aware that regular exercise helps with all sorts of issues and makes people stronger into old age. That’s not what I was thinking about when I was thirty-six. It was about being in shape, whatever that meant.
So far, I feel pretty good about being in my forties. It’s early days, I know, but none of it scares me the way pop culture always insisted “turning forty” should. In real life, I kept hearing things like “it happens overnight,” with no one really specifying what “it” was. Turns out, they were right, and the “it” is simply having an aging body that requires more maintenance than you’re used to thinking about. That’s far from the “life is over” message film and TV offered me growing up, especially when it came to women reaching the end of their biological purpose so should therefore retreat into the woods. Which, some weeks, doesn’t sound so bad.
The truth is, the best shape of my life was when I was eating free “office perk” bagels (and little else) every day, never exercising, and going out more nights than I wasn’t without feeling tired the next morning. I’m never going to be in that kind of shape again. I don’t know if any forty-something committed to being “in shape” really thinks “being twenty-three again” is what they’ll achieve. For one, very few twenty-three-year-olds need to put in that much effort just to function.
Now I can buy my own bagels, but having one even once a week, let alone multiple days in a row, makes me feel bloated just thinking about it. I also learned somewhere in my mid-thirties that having more than two alcoholic drinks is just not worth it, and sometimes even a second drink won’t happen if I don’t also have food and water with it.
Paying attention to these minor changes was a big part of my thirties, but for the most part, the health I paid attention to most in that decade was my mental health. Knowing how and when to quit my former job, better understanding my social limitations to give myself time to recharge, allowing myself to have a work-life balance. While I’m keeping all of those lessons for my forties, I already know this decade will be about becoming physically stronger too.
That exercise bike still sits unused (by me, anyway), but I joined a gym and actively eat better instead of just thinking about eating better. But also? I feel better. That’s more important than the rest.
I have no idea what shape I’ll be in by the time this decade is over. One I’m happy with, I hope. One that is more capable and less tired. One I’ll consider my best. Not the effortless “best” of age twenty-three, mind you, but I have no interest in aging backwards anyway. That’s no fun.
Fun Stuff
What I’m Reading: A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers
What I’m Watching: How To Die Alone (Hulu)
What I’m Listening to: Pop Culture Happy Hour (podcast)
What I’m Eating: Something pumpkin-flavored