First posted July 9, 2014. Updated!
I used to be an athlete. I played summer soccer for seven years as a kid, and I played tennis all through high school. I also danced for eleven years.
Despite all those years of physical activity, I never seemed like an athlete. I wasn’t very coordinated in gym class, I couldn’t run a mile all that quickly, and don’t get me started on push-ups. While I was a decent soccer player and a decent dancer and a decent tennis player, I wasn’t great, so it’s unsurprising that by college all that stuff fell to the wayside. Barring a few months of working out sporadically in college, I avoided words like “treadmill” and “elliptical” and “weight-lifting” until about two years ago, when I joined a gym.