What Are You Training For?

Have you ever thought about something you’d love to do, then wondered whether your body would be up for it? Maybe it’s a trail you’ve wanted to hike, or a whole day wandering through a new city. You want to enjoy it without wondering how your knees or feet will hold up.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. I have dropped arches, and since finishing physical therapy I’ve kept doing the strengthening exercises on my own. When people ask what I’m training for, that’s where my answer starts. I don’t exercise because I enjoy every workout. Some of them I enjoy, and most of them I just do. I exercise because I want to keep saying yes.

What Saying Yes Looks Like

For me, yes means hiking through a national park without stopping every fifteen minutes, and climbing lighthouse stairs without my knees announcing themselves on the way up. It means spending a full Saturday exploring a city, and getting down on the floor with the dogs and back up again without making it a production. Those are the things I’m training for, and most of the work for them happens in ordinary weeks.

What I See at Work

Every week I work with people who are in pain. Some of them can’t get comfortable on the table, and some wince when they have to shift positions. A lot of them tell me they used to hike or garden or travel, before their knee or their back got in the way.

Plenty of those situations weren’t preventable, and I’m not suggesting otherwise. I only know what people tell me, and what they tell me is often some version of “I used to.” I hear it often enough to take the long view seriously, and to keep working on the parts I can influence.

Training for Choices

My answer to that question has changed over the years. These days I’m training for choices. I want to say yes to a trip without wondering whether my body can handle it, and spend a Saturday on my feet without planning the recovery around it. I want to keep the walks, the parks, and the weekends I’d miss if they went away.

Staying capable is what keeps those options open. Without it, a life can narrow without anyone deciding it should.

What It Looks Like in a Real Week

Staying capable might look like a walk most days and a few exercises that feel like homework. It looks like showing up to the workout you planned when you’d rather not, and getting back to it after the weeks when you didn’t. That’s what it looks like for me, too.

None of us knows what our knees or backs will look like twenty years from now. I’d rather meet that future with the strongest body I can build today, and that’s why I keep showing up.

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Staying able to take part in the life you want is the Capacity part of the Fully Lived Framework, our 90-day guided program.