"Hard" Doesn't Mean "Stop"

As I’ve mentioned here before, I did not grow up playing sports. I remember riding my bike and running in the park and playing tag with my friends in elementary school, but around puberty — for some reason — I stopped being physically active. In high school, PE class was mandatory, but it meant crowding into a hot gym with the other girls and trying to follow a Jane Fonda workout video while the boys went outside and played kickball. By the time I got to college, exercise had dropped entirely off my radar screen.

Several nights a week freshman year, my roommate and I would study until midnight, walk to the Store 24, buy a pint of Ben & Jerry’s New York Super Fudge Chunk, and split it on the way home. After a semester of this, my jeans didn’t fit anymore. But my roommate, who was on the track team, was doing fine. She suggested I start running with her.

Why not? I thought. What could go wrong?

I wriggled into my sweatpants and Chuck T’s and gamely followed her out of our dorm for what she promised would be an easy two miler. We started a slow jog up the two-block span of Science Hill. By the halfway mark, I was huffing and red-faced and convinced I was having a major medical incident. I collapsed forward, resting my forearms on my knees.

“What’s wrong?” my roommate asked. Her diction was crisp, betraying not the slightest hint of oxygen debt.

“I need to stop,” I panted. “This is hard.”

She laughed. “Hard doesn’t mean stop. Let’s walk for a minute.”

Hard doesn’t mean stop. This was a record scratch moment for someone who had never willingly tested her body’s limits. I didn’t know it was possible — much less desirable — to hang out in some middle ground of physical exertion between just dandy and actively dying.

I’d like to say that I continued jogging after that first foray, but that would be a lie. It was a one and done. Nevertheless, the groundwork was laid. Years later I revisited running, finished enough 5 and 10Ks to fill a t-shirt drawer, and even managed a half-marathon.

And later still, I learned that hard doesn’t mean stop also applies to lifting weights. To be effective, a strength training program must become gradually more demanding over time. Which means that eventually, things get hard. Those deadlifts and bench presses you repped out smoothly at the beginning can become painstaking affairs. If you want to continue to progress, you’ll have to tap into your physical and mental reserves. You’ll need to head north of “stroll in the park” and south of “soul-crushingly hard” to discover your personal Goldilocks territory of “suitably strenuous.”

Because hard doesn’t mean stop. It means you’re getting stronger.