For the better part of my life, being “fit” has gleamed like a distant object on the horizon, one that I’ve had to squint to make clear. Unattainable, elusive, overwhelming. Nonetheless, my desire to attain “it”, fitness, remained simmering, if not at a roaring boil. This was especially true when I crossed paths with a mirror and was confronted with how far from this ideal I stood. There’s a subtle awe that an impressively built physique elicits. Seeing, even in passing, a strong, lean figure, balletic in its effortless grace, confers a degree of respect in the onlooker. What I saw when I faced my reflection was a frumpy, awkward dissolute. This was not exactly a positive (nor helpful) self-concept, especially for a fifth grader. I resolved to change myself. Charging into the endeavor, I consulted YouTube for exercise content and devised a strict regimen. I share with you now a sample of this program as it was written (my confusion of “reps” and “sets” included):
MONDAY
7:00 AM 3 sets
Stretching and running 10 mins
1-2 reps 50 push-ups
1-2 reps 50 shoulder taps
1-2 reps 35 punching presses
1-2 reps 20 squats
1-2 reps 15 burpees
1-3 reps 1 min horse stance
1-2 reps 50 sit-ups
1-2 reps 50 leg raises
1-2 reps 25 V-ups
1:00 PM 2 sets
Sprint 1 min
15 min HIIT
200 jumping jacks
Fast feet 1 min
15 burpees
Back Squats until failure
Dumbbell Jump Squats until failure
Jumping Split Squats until failure
Frog jumps until failure
4:00 PM 3 sets
Stretching and isometric 15 min
Weights 15 mins
1-3 reps 30 iron butterflies
1-3 reps 50 sit-ups
1-3 reps 50 flutter kicks
1-2 reps 10 dips
1-3 reps 35 deadhang chin-ups
1-2 reps 50 push-ups
1-2 reps 35 triceps press
1-2 reps 25 inverted rows
1-3 reps 10 leg presses
1-3 reps 35 squats
1-3 reps 15 lunges
Pushups until failure
Body Squats until failure
Sit-ups until Failure
Sprints (100m) 4 times
Jump Rope until failure
HIIT
Disclaimer: I had drafted this at the woefully misguided age of eleven. Needless to say, I was unable to keep to it with any real consistency, and it didn’t help that I paired what was a car bomb to my central nervous system with a half-wrought, restrictive diet that banished any food item that might not make a person regret having been born.
Other attempts to assimilate myself into the class of “gym rat” were similarly short-lived and ill-approached. Each “failure” torpedoed my morale and belief in myself, making subsequent efforts harder than the last.
This calcified into a harmful narrative: I couldn’t instantiate my aerobic ambitions because of deficient willpower, discipline — because I didn’t want it badly enough. Not really. This deepened an already existing misapprehension that “fit people” were in a league that was beyond me and furthered the mysticism of exercise as an aptitude that one must have an inborn proclivity for, like sorcery or being double-jointed.
I shelved my dreams of twenty-inch biceps and a waist that could slide through a Pringles can. I condemned it to “the future”, to “eventually”, to “one day”, a perfect day, inhabited by a perfect me, perfectly capable of perfectly executing a perfect routine to finally realize my perfect bod.
That day never quite arrived. Either because it wasn’t the first of the month, or I was a bit groggy from a poor night of sleep, or life’s vicissitudes were giving me a swirly. Describing this attitude of mine, I can now hear how it rang with the deafening drone of inertia, which makes what knocked me out of this inertia all the more inexplicable. What finally got me to pick up a dumbbell, why for a year now a week hasn’t passed where I haven’t stepped foot into a gym: A novel. A good novel. A novel about struggling artists in New England butting against the institution of success. For the average person, nothing within the pages of Antonia Angress’s Sirens & Muses would impress upon them the merits of the lat pulldown, much less incite a passion for pumping iron. But what I extrapolated was the message that I am a young woman balancing on the balls of my feet at the precipice between adolescence and adulthood. I am trying, and there is more to struggle through coming my way, but the potential energy of an object perched so high can translate into great velocity. In the denouement of the novel, Louisa, one of the four characters whom we’ve been following, returns to her home state of Louisiana in the wake of her grandfather’s passing. Her mother shares with her a piece from Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy:
“The First Step”
The young poet Evmenis
complained one day to Theocritus:
“I’ve been writing for two years now
and I’ve composed only one idyll.
It’s my single completed work.
I see, sadly, that the ladder
of Poetry is tall, extremely tall;
and from this first step I’m standing on now
I’ll never climb any higher.”
Theocritus retorted: “Words like that
are improper, blasphemous.
Just to be on the first step
should make you happy and proud.
To have reached this point is no small achievement:
what you’ve done already is a wonderful thing.
Even this first step
is a long way above the ordinary world.
To stand on this step
you must be in your own right
a member of the city of ideas.
And it’s a hard, unusual thing
to be enrolled as a citizen of that city.
Its councils are full of Legislators
no charlatan can fool.
To have reached this point is no small achievement:
what you’ve done already is a wonderful thing.”
Reading these words, I was reduced to tears and forty bucks plus a fifteen-dollar initiation fee: the cost of a YMCA membership.
By: Malaika W. Kamau
Malaika W. Kamau (author of If Orpheus Was a Carp) was born in 2006 in Lusaka, Zambia, but was a perpetual nomad throughout her childhood and adolescence as part and parcel of being an army brat. Today, Kamau manages her undergraduate coursework at New York University while moonlighting as a writer and aspiring filmmaker. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in BRIO, The Corsair, The Dilettante, Vagabond City, Porridge Magazine, and elsewhere.
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