Words are important, and calling “exercise” an activity that should be (and is) natural to human beings has a not insignificant negative effect: it makes it resemble a school assignment, i.e., something to which you would prefer the removal of your wisdom teeth (lower, notoriously the most difficult and painful to extract).
Technically they are exercises, we agree, yet calling them so puts a distance between us and something that is natural because we are meant to move, not stand still.
Physical activity after all is also a very mental matter: if you are not convinced that there is not only a need to do it but, indeed that you enjoy doing it, there are not many other ways to find motivation.
A mission
Here at Runlovers we have been talking about running and movement for almost 10 years. When I think about how we talked about it, I find that there is a word that we have always associated with movement, and it is not necessity or duty: it is fun.
If you have had the same relationship I have had with sports, fun is not the first thing that comes to mind when you think of running or physical activity. You are more likely to come up with words or expressions such as “duty” or “it’s better to do it” but certainly not “fun.” Going back to the beginning, however, fun is not just something that makes you smile or solaces you. If we were to refer to its meaning, “entertain” means “to turn elsewhere,” that is, to take a different path. Doing something different from what one would normally do, in short. And it’s true: for us Runlovers, running is having fun, in the sense that it’s doing something different, something unexpected that takes us into uncharted territories, toward our limits.
In some ways it is a way of consciously finding oneself out of place. We try never to be in our place but always elsewhere, where we are not expected to be. This is what the meaning of fun is.
Because we return to those places
Over the years, I stopped calling it exercise. I don’t “exercise”-I run, because “run” is the only verb that describes what I do. And fortunately, the way I view this activity has also changed: it is no longer something that is best to do but something that I enjoy and want to do. Not only that, it is part of my life, just as I eat or work or sleep every single day. Why in fact should there not be room in our agenda for that as well? Should only commitments or necessary things go in? Never the pleasure?
I couldn’t say exactly what clicked in my head that made me change my idea of physical activity: a certain day I stopped seeing it as something boring and tiring and began to see it just as a moment I looked forward to. Maybe that was the day I stopped calling it “exercise” and called it “fun.” Because words are important.