20 Overhead Squats

15 Double Unders

10 Push ups

7 Rounds…on a Sunday night…in the backyard, to this.

Two months ago, you would NOT have found me here.

More likely you would probably have found me in my car – or at my computer – making some very sensible, perfectly reasonable excuse as to why I did not have time to work out.

Maybe I had to meet someone. Maybe I had work to do. But, if I’m totally honest, I just didn’t want to move. I’d been out of my workout rhythm long enough that I was pretty sure going back to the gym would be too humiliating for me to handle. Funny the games your mind plays on you…

At the root of my low-energy, bummed out little mindset was a total disregard for this blessed fact:

Movement is a nutrient.

We all know oxygen is a critical ‘nutrient’ for life. We’d only live minutes without it. Food – essential. We miss one meal and we wind up ravenous. Skip some sleep – clearly crucial to the systems of our bodies functioning – and anyone around us can tell. But movement is tricky – somehow it’s easy for us to go hungry.

When we are movement deficient, it isn’t easily apparent. The slippery, slow process toward lower energy levels, greater mental stress, and an increasingly squishier middle section is less noticeable than screaming lungs or a ravenous stomach. Too easily, our time set aside to move these bodies takes a back seat to the urgent to-do’s of the day. Emails. Errands. Kid drop-off. Kid pick-up. The American Music Awards…etc.

But here is the thing:

The sweetest victory is the one that’s most difficult. 

The beautiful thing about movement is that when we choose it – moving, panting, sweating hard core – staring our fears in the face, regardless of how difficult it is – it gets easier.

A week and a half ago, I returned to my home gym, North Shore Crossfit, for the first time in months. Mustering up the energy to go was like telling one of those kids from Jimmy Kimmel’s Hallloween video that they couldn’t have their candy. I was in rough shape. Cranking serious tunes to get there was essential – and I literally put these guys on repeat all the way home to get changed – and all the way to the gym. I might have even cried a little.

And the workout? Maybe one of the most brutal workouts I’ve ever done. Sandbag sprints, sandbag lunges, sandbag push presses – ending with a sandbag obstacle run. Pretty sure my lungs were on fire – and I surely felt the fire in my quads. But nothing  – nothing – could have matched the feeling of dropping to the floor at the end of that workout. Finished, completed, victorious. Nothing.

Discover that the person you thought you were

is no match for the one you truly are.

It’s only been a week and a half, and so many things have changed. My head space is clearer. My sleep is more sound. And my smile is returning. I’ve even had a few nice compliments on my healthy glow (so maybe they were from a salty sailor who hasn’t seen more than three women in the last four months – but still! It’s spurring me on!).

Finally I’m believing what I’ve known for so long: Movement is an essential nutrient. And I’m not going hungry any more…

Check out one of my favorite, time-saving workouts here: Our bodies can do more than we think they can.