by Madeleine St. Marie
Anyone who knows me knows that I am a pretty competitive person. My competitive spirit has helped push me in areas of my life – academics, athletics – and has helped me reach a degree of success that I would not have otherwise known, with the glaring exception of mathematics. Nothing, not even divine intervention, can make the relationship between mathematics and myself positive. Nothing. Anyway, I’m competitive, and I know this about myself. Now, I am not?judgmentally?competitive. I just want to be at my very best, and sometimes that requires picking out a person and and forcing myself to keep up with them. I’d actually say that by nature, I’m a fairly lazy person, and the laundry strewn across my bedroom floor tends to agree with this assessment.
But see, I know?I’m lazy. Left to my own devices, I will eat Oreos and pizza until they could roll me, Violet Beauregarde-style, from place to place. Thankfully, I also know that I feel much better after working out. I know that my immune system will work better, harder, and more efficiently if I’m in shape (or at least attempting to be). Knowing that the endorphin rush I get after a workout will make me feel good gets me in the door; knowing that I want to do the most pushups or burpees that I’ve ever done keeps me training hard.
I’ll admit that there is a level of frustration when I’ve been training hard (or at least, I think so) and I don’t see any improvements in my weight or body fat percentage. But to make a change in that is on me. If I want that number to go down, I have to want it. And I have to want it more than anyone. Sometimes, that want is really difficult to come by; this holiday season, I basically wanted to crawl under a mountain of junk food and stay there for a few weeks, which is essentially what I did. And sometimes, like in the month or two leading up to the Spartan Race, that want is extremely easy to access. But no one – not my mother, not my boyfriend, not my doctor – can want this more than me. I have to want it for myself. And sometimes that means that simply showing up to the gym is a huge victory, even though I know that I don’t want to be there. My competitive spirit saves me, and suddenly I’m trying to go nonstop in an ab section when I thought I had nothing left.
I can’t want this for anyone other than me, either. Recently, my boyfriend had done a lot of talking about wanting to make a change, wanting to workout more. So naturally, I encouraged him to come to the gym with me, since working out with a buddy helps with motivation. Not many people are really good at self-motivating at the gym. If you are, kudos to you! I’m not. That’s why I work really well in group classes. Anyway, I encouraged him to go to the gym and he accepted…a few times. I began to get frustrated because I wanted him to work out more than he wanted to himself – wasn’t he talking about working out all the time? Didn’t he say he wished he went to the gym more often? Yeah, he did, but it’s not up to me to get him to the Arena: it’s up to him.
When it comes to making a big change in your life, whether it has to do with fitness or any sort of behavior, you have to want to make a change. I may want a friend to stop smoking cigarettes, but I can’t expect anything to change if I want that more than she does. Right before I decided as a New Year’s Resolution for 2010 to, once and for all, get back into shape and to stop my slow trend upward into larger clothing sizes, I was miserable but I didn’t really want?it. If I had, I would have stopped making the excuses. I would have stopped eating fast food for every 5th meal. But I didn’t, because when it came down to it, I didn’t truly want it. Or, at the very least, I didn’t want it enough to make real sacrifices and effect real change.
So, be honest: what do you want? Why do you want to go the gym? To have a sweet beach body by Spring Break? To take a proactive route to being healthy instead of reacting to a bad situation like high blood pressure or diabetes? To feel good and relieve stress? Trust me, I want you to have it. But you’re going to have to want it more.