I'm going to talk about running. Feel free to click away. I certainly would have, two months ago. Running, jogging, exercising or indeed, physical movement in general were all things that I had absolutely no interest in. The only way I was running anywhere was if there was a lion behind me and an ice cream truck in front of me. But cut to about six weeks later, and now I'm running three times a week, and wishing it could be more. I'm still terrible at it, mind you -- it's like watching a fat bird trying to escape the tyranny of its own legs -- but I'm goddamn doing it, and there's nobody more surprised by that fact than me. And all because I realized four stupidly simple things:

4 It's Not an All or Nothing Scenario

I'd always thought of exercise as an all or nothing affair. Either you do it, or you don't. If you can't run for an hour, you don't go running. There's no point to it. If you can't do 50 sit-ups, it's not going to do you any good to do 20, so don't bother. I know that idea is, to put it politely, so retarded that it gets special paychecks from the government three times a year, but there are a lot of people operating under the same assumption, even if they don't consciously realize it. And like all things -- from the decline of our economy to cheese being

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so bad for you even though it's so good -- I blame the public education system. In this case, it was gym class or, as fat young me knew it, "that hour where everybody gets together in an auditorium to look at your pasty legs and judge you."

"STOP BOOING! OH GOD, I DON'T UNDERSTAND HOW THIS IS HELPING MY EDUCATION."

I couldn't do shit as a chubby kid, but that didn't matter to the merciless god of Physical Education: Everybody climbed the same rope, played the same dodgeball and ran the same mile. There was no tiered difficulty system. Either you can do it, or you can't.

Sound familiar?

It was a fucked, apathetic system: The kids with superior genetics and shoe-money were put right up there against the tubby kid with the cereal bowl-cut, and there was no handicap depending on how much you liked sandwiches and hated baseball. And don't say it wasn't a competition, because