What Am I Training For?

September 15, 2026

By Tammy

One of the gifts I wish I had received in childhood is exercise.

I don't mean being raised to be an athlete. I mean being taught that moving your body is a habit you need to develop and maintain throughout your life. You learn its importance early, develop a healthy relationship with it, and eventually you don't have to continually decide whether you are going to exercise. You just do it on repeat, just like brushing your teeth.

There were periods in my childhood when I danced and did gymnastics, and I loved both. But my childhood was unstable, and consistency wasn't something I had much of. You could depend on it being consistently inconsistent.

I exercised on and off in my twenties and thirties. I was also a young mother, then a single mother, working, dealing with difficult family dynamics and juggling more than I knew how to juggle. Much of that period of my life was about survival. Exercise was something I did when I could.

I don't look back at that younger version of myself and think she should have tried harder. She simply didn’t know how. There were so many demands and so little time. There were so many problems she was dealing with that were not hers to deal with and then there were the problems that she created all on her own. She was just trying to survive. What I wish she had understood was that she was important too.

My other wish is that I had given my children the gift of exercise. I didn't focus on it. Didn’t even realize I should. I wish I had known enough to make movement an ordinary part of our lives.

When I was younger, exercise had little to do with health. I wanted to lose weight. I wanted a smaller waist and a flatter stomach. I wanted a smaller butt and thinner thighs. Later in life I realized some of those wants were not even compatible with my actual physique.

By my mid-forties, I was exercising more consistently. Then my health changed.

I developed a cough that every doctor I saw believed was allergy-related, although the allergy medications I tried simply didn’t work. This affected my quality of life for about three years. I would cough for roughly seven months of the year and then have about five months when I was fine. Each year, I became weaker and my endurance diminished. I was also ashamed of the things I could no longer do and blamed myself too.

Physical exertion could leave me completely out of breath. Sometimes it took minutes to recover. There is a difference between being winded and feeling as though you cannot get enough air. In those moments, panic set in.

So I started avoiding things. Long walks and stairs. Shopping could take a great deal out of me. I suddenly was concerned about where we were parking, and the previous me would have chosen the furthest parking spot away for two reasons, more steps and I’m simply not great at parking. Trips required thinking about what I would physically be able to do. I remember going to the caves in La Jolla with my family and not going down because I knew I couldn't manage the stairs. I felt like I had let my family down.

That was one of the difficult parts of being physically limited in a way that wasn't necessarily obvious to everyone else. Sometimes people think you don't want to do something when the truth is you simply can't. I knew I couldn't manage the 100 plus stairs back up.

Around that period I attended a demanding work event that required a tremendous amount of walking. I could barely keep up with my colleagues. I did it, but just barely, and I remember thinking that I had become terribly out of shape.

Four months later, I hemorrhaged and required a blood transfusion. I had been losing blood for months. Only then did I understand that what I had interpreted as simply being out of shape had been happening while my hemoglobin was low. My body had been struggling in ways I didn't yet understand.

I had been dealing with the cough for years. I had been losing blood for months before the hemorrhage, and later there were ovarian cysts. My health issues were compounding and somewhere in all of that, I lost something I had previously taken for granted. My health and trust in my body.

I began organizing parts of my life around what I couldn't do and that was stressful. Coming back from that didn't begin with anything that resembled a workout. It began at my office. I would walk for one to three minutes with a cough drop in my mouth. I did that a few times during the day. I also did sets of squats and lunges here and there scattered throughout the day.

That was what I could do, so that was what I did.

Eventually, there was a trip to Hawaii and a walk to a waterfall. It wasn't an especially difficult walk, and I hadn't lost the 60 pounds I would eventually lose. I had been getting weekly massages simply trying to manage my pain and had started doing those little walks at work. But I could walk to the waterfall. Barely, but that counted.

Recently, I was in Julian and walked up a street with a very steep incline. Three years ago, I would have looked at that hill and anxiety would have filled my body. I would have been thinking about whether I could make it, what would happen if I lost my breath and how long it might take me to recover. This time, I walked up it. Didn’t even think about it until I was at the top and thought about how far I had come. It’s a little thing, but I will never take it for granted again. Those moments have changed how I think about exercise far more than a smaller waist ever could.

I am 56 now. I have lost about 60 pounds over the past two years, and realistically I probably have another 60 to 80 pounds to lose.

I don't know exactly where my final weight will land because I have not committed to a number.

I will consider the number. I will also consider my health, how I feel, what my body can do and, yes, how my clothes fit. I enjoy clothes more 60 pounds lighter. I actually wore a dress recently for the first time in years.

Making my body smaller is no longer the answer to the question of why I exercise.

I want to be strong, build muscle and increase my flexibility and balance.

I want to be able to take care of myself as I get older. I want to get off the floor easily and take care of my own needs for as long as I possibly can, but I want more than the ability to take care of myself.

I want to travel. I want to wander through a city without thinking about how far I have already walked or how far it is back to the hotel or if there is a steep incline. I want to take the stairs because there is something at the bottom I want to see. I want to go on an adventure without first wondering whether my body can handle it. I want the ability to be spontaneous.

I know what it is like to look at an experience and calculate whether I am physically capable of participating. I don't want to spend the later years of my life doing that if there are things I can do now to help preserve my ability to say yes. I want to fully participate in my family too.

A full day with my granddaughter can still exhaust me enough that I need to recover afterward, but that is normal exhaustion after chasing a high-energy four-year-old. I want to experience life with her. I want to play. As she gets older, I want my physical ability to expand what we can do together, not determine what I have to sit out.

I don't believe exercise gives us control over health and how we age. My own health has already taught me otherwise. Bodies can become ill. Things happen that we did not cause and cannot prevent. There are no guarantees that doing everything right will produce the future we want.

I know there are things I can do to improve my chances of living with the quality of life I want. Pilates has been part of my life, on and off, since my twenties, and I still love it. I can hold a plank. I can stand on the reformer and work comfortably. I am grateful for what my body can do, and increasingly humbled by it.

Now I am getting back to the gym. I know the uphill treadmill will be hard at first. The weights will be hard. I also know something I didn't know when I was younger. I have conquered hard beginnings before. Won’t be the first time and I’m confident I’ve got this. I know that if I keep showing up, in a few weeks what feels difficult today will probably feel better, and I will gain confidence in the process. I am older, and I will listen to my body.

At 56, I feel some urgency about all of this. I also feel something that may be more important.

I have time. I refuse to let time be the reason I can’t or I won’t.

I have time to increase my strength, muscle and flexibility. I have time to lose more weight. These things do not guarantee the outcome. I know that firsthand. But knowing I cannot control everything is no longer a reason to do nothing about the things I can influence.

I am 56, and I have time.

I have time to create a relationship with exercise that can carry me for the rest of my life.