Nobody Makes Me Do This

Nobody was making me get into a stranger's car before sunrise, in a city I'd never been to, to sweat with people I'd never see again.

I have never regretted a five a.m. workout.

The Uber driver asked me twice if I had the right address. I was in a city I barely knew, at a painting retreat, headed to a studio I found the night before at eleven o'clock, scrolling workout class schedules like it was a matter of some urgency. It kind of was. 

I had no car. There were no studios within walking distance. And still, there I was, in the back of a stranger's car before sunrise, going to sweat with people I would never see again, in a city where nobody was making me do this.

Nobody ever is. That's the part people seem to miss when they hear about mornings like that one and assume there's an obligation somewhere underneath it. There isn't. There's just me, and a decision I keep making, over and over, in places that have nothing to do with each other except that I show up in all of them.

Making a commitment to myself and actually keeping it matters to me more than almost anything else. My workouts are that kind of commitment. When I travel, for work or fun, the research starts before I've packed a bag. I find the class, the time, the studio that will take a stranger for one morning, before I know where I'm sleeping or what the weather will do. Figuring that out has become its own small adventure. Where will I belong for an hour, in a city that has no idea who I am yet.

And just for the record, I don't always wake up wanting to go. There's a resistance that shows up before the alarm goes off, the part of me that would rather stay under the blanket than get into a stranger's car in the dark. 

It isn't really about the workout. It's the not-knowing. Will the class be too hard. Will I walk in and be the only one who doesn't know anyone, standing in the wrong spot, using the wrong weight. Some mornings the bed wins the argument for a few extra minutes before I get up anyway.

Yes, I get up anyway. And on the other side of that decision, more often than not, is something I never would have found if I'd stayed in bed and called it self-care instead.

An Uber driver told me the whole story of his daughter's wedding on the ride home from a studio I'd never go back to. A woman in my Florida HIIT class, whose last name I still don't know, started asking about my parents once she learned I was in town again to see them. A five-day retreat in a city I'd never visited turned into a real, if small, tour of the actual place, the parts you only find at six in the morning, not the parts you see from a hotel window.

My parents think I'm a little crazy every winter, driving thirty minutes each morning to a gym near their house in Florida because there isn’t one close by. My friends have said some version of the same thing, usually kindly. You really can't just take the week off?

I understand why it looks that way from the outside. It probably does look like restlessness, like I can't sit still even on vacation, like I've traded the whole point of a trip for a routine I can't put down even for people I love. I used to wonder if they had a point.

But I'm not doing this in spite of the trip. 

We've been taught to think of discipline and adventure as opposites, like they're standing on either side of a line and you have to pick. Adventure is supposed to look like letting go of the plan entirely. Discipline is supposed to look like the itinerary, the alarm, the thing standing between you and the good part. I don't think that's true anymore, not after enough mornings like this one. 

My discipline is the reason I've been let into rooms I never would have found otherwise. It has been fun and I have met so many wonderful people. The version of me who sleeps in hasn't chosen ease. She's chosen the familiar, and there's a difference.

I think about this more broadly than workouts, if I'm honest. I think about all the small, private commitments we make to ourselves and then quietly let dissolve the second we're somewhere unfamiliar, as if consistency only counts when it's easy to keep. The instrument that stays in its case the whole vacation. The book that never gets opened because there's no routine to hold it up. The habit of calling a friend on Sundays that disappears the moment the calendar gets busy, as if the friendship only mattered when it was convenient.

I wonder what it would look like to treat one of those things the way I treat the gym. Not as something you'll get back to eventually, once things settle down, once you're home, once life slows enough to make room for it. But as something you build a life around making time for, wherever you are.

What is the thing you've decided doesn't travel with you. And what would it cost to bring it along, just once, into a place that doesn't know you yet.

What is the resistance you feel right before you do it anyway, and have you ever actually looked at it closely, instead of just pushing past it in the dark. Because mine, it turns out, was never really about the workout. It was about being new somewhere, again and again, and choosing that discomfort on purpose because of what is waiting on the other side.

What might be waiting on the other side of yours? A person. A place. A version of a trip, or a whole year, that you'd never find any other way, because you never let yourself get uncomfortable enough to go looking.

The gym was never an obligation, but rather an invitation.