Do you secretly hate exercising but feel like you have to do it?

ME TOO! And I am starting a support group for people like us. People who don’t really enjoy sweating and breathing hard, who feel like hamsters when we set foot on a treadmill or an elliptical, and who would sit on our butts all day, every day, were it not for a nagging feeling that doing so would bring about an early, preventable death.

My name is Yvonne, and I am a couchaholic.

I wasn’t always a couchaholic. I was very, very active for most of my childhood. I took dance classes and played soccer year-round. But I eventually quit dancing and playing soccer and stopped making time for physical activity in my life. I got by in college by walking all over the three-mile-long campus, taking free yoga classes, and playing the occasional game of Ultimate Frisbee. Then I moved to Pittsburgh for grad school and the campus got smaller and the yoga stopped being free, but I still played intramural volleyball. And then I moved to Houston, where people drive a half mile to buy a sandwich. All this, plus advancing age, made me realize that I really needed to make time to exercise and take care of my body.

After a year in Houston, I was not in good shape. I had gained weight and lost muscle tone. On my occasional trips back to Pittsburgh, I found my legs getting sore after distances I used to walk effortlessly. I had also lost so much core strength that standing for a few hours made my back hurt and I aggravated an old lower back injury several times, each time requiring two days of rest before I could walk without pain.

I started working out seriously in October, after my husband bought me a pair of running shoes. I began logging my runs on RunKeeper in December, and this month I hit the 50-mile mark. As you can see from my RunKeeper log, I am not extremely consistent—there are a couple of 3-week hiatuses in there. But I have stuck with it longer than I have stuck with any other exercise regimen outside of organized sports.

I still don’t particularly enjoy running, and there are 65-year-olds who can run circles around me, but I can run now. Three miles, no walking, and I’ll still have energy at the end of it. I’ve also resumed the yoga, once again free thanks to instructors who post videos on YouTube. I’m in better shape now than I’ve been in at least six years, and that feels good.

And so this is my invitation to everyone else out there who needs to drag their butts off the couch to exercise to join me, and we can encourage each other to continue dragging our butts off the couch. And so we can have the best part of team sports—the socializing—while doing solo exercise activities all over the globe.

If you’re interested in joining Couchaholics Anonymous, here are our steps (only four!):

1. Make your doctor a partner in achieving and maintaining good health. Not only should you consult your doctor before beginning a new exercise regimen, but your doctor can diagnose and help you manage conditions that affect your energy levels and ability to exercise.
2. Make a decision to focus on yourself and do the exercise that is right for you. When you’re just starting out, it’s tempting to compare yourself to everyone else at the gym or on the track. Don’t. Set a pace and a routine that is comfortable for you and stick with it.
3. Make a decision to invest in the right equipment. Don’t get the cheapest stuff out there. Assume you will stick with it and spend the money to buy decent (but not the most expensive) shoes, clothing, and other gear (including gear for different seasons, if necessary). Getting in shape will be hard enough without having to fight against uncomfortable or unreliable equipment.
4. Log your workouts and be proud of your progress. Take the time to celebrate milestones, like by posting one of these chips on your blog when you’ve earned it!

It says 6.2 on the logo, but they added a 5K this year. I’ll be running that on April 23. I hope to drop some time between the last race and this one.

I plan to run roughly twice a week: one speed drill and one long (5K-ish) run. For the speed drills, I’m going back to the first week of the Couch to 5K program and using it as a sprint/walk workout. I tried it for the first time last week and it was surprisingly fun. I’ve always been more of a natural sprinter and it felt really good to run as fast as I could for a minute before walking again.

And in keeping with the theme of approaching running differently, I finally decided to invest in real running clothes after years and years of running and working out in essentially my pajamas. Now I’ve got tops and shorts that wick away sweat, socks that don’t scrunch and bunch and leave weird tanlines, and pockets to hold keys and tissues. Maybe it’s just resolution of cognitive dissonance, but it does feel better to run in clothes designed for that purpose.

I ran the 9th Annual Texas Med 5K this morning, the second time in my adult life I’ve run an actual race. My previous attempt was the 2005 Run Like Hell 5K in Pittsburgh. There was also an aborted attempt at the USA Fit 5K in January because running in freezing rain is no fun.

My unofficial finish time this morning was 35:47;still awaiting official chip time results. My official chip time was 35:36. While slow, this is almost exactly the pace I’d planned to run (slightly faster, actually)—in other words, not so fast that I’m going to hate myself at the end. I pushed really hard and ran a 31:09 back in 2005 and…it took me over 5 years to try to run another race again.

This is the third time since my year-round-soccer-playing days I’m seriously trying to pick up running as a sport, and I’m hoping I can stick with it this time. Previously I’d approached running as primarily a competitive/social activity, almost always running with a (usually super-fit) friend. Now, I’m pursuing it as a solo/health activity and this, along with changes to my training philosophy and better management of my exercise-induced asthma will make the difference.

See, I’ve never really liked running as an activity in and of itself and only enjoyed it when it was mixed in with a soccer or Ultimate Frisbee match. But I’ve always felt I should enjoy running. And furthermore, I’ve always felt that I should be a fast runner—lingering wishful thinking from my tween years when I really was the fastest girl in my class. And so when I would try to run before, I would always push too hard, too fast, it would be miserable, and I would quit at the first major obstacle or disruption in my training routine.

Now, I’m only running for me. I will be fine running slow, and I will not run in conditions that make me miserable (like freezing rain) or push until I hit a wall. The goal is long-term consistency for health and fitness, not to force my body into my half-cocked idea of what it should be able to do.

So this morning I aimed to run 12-minute miles, which is a pace I can sustain comfortably over 5K. I had enough left in the tank to pick up the pace considerably at the very end and finish without being exhausted.

And it was fun! I’ll be signing up for another one soon.

Rather than writing a long introduction, let me just say this. This new blog is all about the inanities of my life: what TV I’m watching, what I found on YouTube, my latest electronic doodad, and whatever random thoughts pop into my head. I am purposely not going to talk about anything serious here, but you might get to know me a little better by reading.