Adjusting to Life As A Former College Athlete

It’s never as cliché as waking up in the morning and staring at your out of shape body in the morning, or as wistful as stopping on your commute back from work and seeing a team practicing. The feeling of being a washed-up has-been is much more subtle and pervasive, echoing in the footsteps of morning joggers and resting in cracking of bones during an errant stretch.

I stopped playing sports and severely cut down on my workout schedule after I graduated from college and began transitioning into the working world. Moving away from my active lifestyle wasn’t a sudden change; it began with earnest, practical reasoning—“I really need to get up early to avoid traffic” turned into “I had a hard week and I just want to lay down.” Besides, no one in my workplace of 30- and 40-somethings was particularly fit and being physically athletic wasn’t exactly going to help me when it came to job performance reviews.

That is, until I went to a regular check-up at the doctor’s office and puzzled over being told I was prehypertensive. Not only had my physical prowess slipped, I’d allowed my health to slip. In the gradual abandonment of a more rigid athletic lifestyle, I’d embraced the bad nutritional habits that’d befallen my older colleagues. I also adopted the work-centric attitude too many of my fellow newcomers to the workforce felt necessary in order to survive in pressurized and sometimes isolating office environment.

I had never really made a “Plan B” for my athletic life and activities. I didn’t look for places to live because of the nearby sports clubs or the number of parks within walking distance, nor was that the consideration I had in mind now. While recreational sports are fun, I myself wasn’t ready to make a real commitment like that, even on an infrequent basis. Not only did I have to consider the time I would need to devote to the workouts, practices, and team-building activities, there was also my own physical health to consider. After years of traveling in cramped seats, repeated tackles, injuries, and strains, my body just wasn’t up to the demands I know I would want to impose, not to mention the fact that my getting injured and possibly needing time away from work to recover would be a real work obstacle for myself and my team, posing a real threat to my career success.

Still, I needed to break out of my post-collegiate sports rut, and with no one else to hold me accountable or compete with, challenging myself became the best option. But challenging myself wasn’t about getting back into shape or just regaining my former physical status; challenging myself meant building a new body through new workouts, new emphasis, and priorities.

Since I no longer had to play a particular position and concentrate on bulking up or slimming down, I could craft new goals. If I wanted to max out my cardio, no one would chastise me for not focusing on strength. If I just wanted to lift and only do a minimum amount of cardio, that was an option as well.

I started experimenting with different gyms and workout programs to find what would work best for my lifestyle and my body goals. I enrolled in everything from yoga and online workout videos to home workout equipment and CrossFit. I was able to try a variety of gyms and styles of fitness through deal sites. This way I was able to pay less than the normal rate for a short trial session. Some worked better than others, others opened me up to things I hadn’t considered before.

Transition to life without a routine, group workouts, practices, skirmishes, and tournaments wasn’t a comforting move, and I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t relapsed a few times. The fact is, it’s difficult to stay fit when you’re just starting an office job and you’re looking to impress your bosses with Excel charts and email chains. That’s why it’s important to take stock of your time schedule, whether you have particular goals in mind, carve out time to workout, and find something that keeps you engaged and coming back every week. You can even try to capitalize on your routine by inviting work colleagues to join you. If they don’t want to join, I found MeetUp helpful for connecting with individuals who wanted to make fitness more of a priority.

Being a former college athlete doesn’t have to mean you’re forever a former athlete. Now is the time to live in your best body and turn “former” into “current,” whether your goal is as small as climbing a flight of stairs and putting your mile time back until nine minutes, or as ambitious as enlisting in the Marine Corps and running in the city’s next marathon.

Remember, the fitness you’re looking to regain won’t come overnight. It’s going to require an embedded routine and some experimentation, so if one particular class or program isn’t working for you, just take different ones until you find the one that’s right for you.

FREE PRINT

Do you like free things? Us too. How about this free print of a dope Harry Potter quote in 3 font options? Enter your email below to receive your free Harry Potter print!

Featured

Why did you move?

A cardstock print sits propped against the lamp on my desk: a taupe watercolor swipe outlining a peakside Saguaro, the sun a tiny ring above. Beneath this minimalist illustration are these words in typeface: “I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.”

I happened upon this notecard-sized print on the way out of a shop last weekend, after already having completed another purchase. It was the last print of its kind in the pile. I had to have it. I returned to the cashier: “This one, too.”

You see, this verse has been a thread weaving through my story, simple words spoken by a prophet long dead, a passage of comfort I’ve returned to again and again since my pilgrimage to the desert four years ago, when I inked a cactus on my wrist.

The Good Old Days

Last week was National Margarita Day.

I did not, however, celebrate the holiday. Truthfully, I’ve yet to find THE Mexican place here in Phoenix. You know the one: gaudy decorations, cheap food, even cheaper margaritas.

But there’s a Mexican restaurant at the corner of Charlotte and Whitebridge in Nashville, TN.

You may have heard of it.

10 Life Lessons This Cross-Country Move is Attempting to Teach Me

There are a few lessons life has attempted to teach me since my move — all things that I haven’t yet spiced up into a full essay, but deserve to be memorialized by my metaphorical pen nonetheless.

So I present a collection of lessons I’ve learned — and am still learning — in the last 3 months.

When The Hardest Thing & The Right Thing Are the Same

“Nuh uh!” I had protested.

The best thing about being 15 years old is that you know absolutely everything there is to know about life.

I certainly did.

I was arguing with my friends over the line in a song from The Fray (#tbt to moody middle school days): “Sometimes the hardest thing and the right thing are the same.”

Doing the right thing should never be hard, I confidently claimed. Anytime you have the choice to do the right thing, the healthy thing, the thing that builds up rather than tears down, it should never, ever be difficult to choose that.

Like I said, I knew everything.

Of course, 13 years later, I know that I don’t actually know much at all. And I also know that the hardest thing and the right thing are just about ALWAYS the same. It’s madness, really.

A Holy Yes to the Real Things: On Setting Social Media Boundaries

Two and a half hours.

That’s how long I had spent on my phone that day. Reading emails, sure. Responding to texts, some. Catching up on news, a bit. But mostly: scrolling through Instagram.

I had spent an hour of my day clicking through clips of someone else’s life. The sad truth? Some days, I’ve spent way more than just one hour lost to Instagram.

This is where the High School Musical cast flash mobs my brain with “we’re all in this together”—because my educated guess is that you can relate to this daily scroll-fest, too.

Who You Are Now: On Outgrowing Earlier Versions of Yourself

In the last few months, I’ve realized, much to my dismay, that I look older. That I am aging. This sounds dramatic coming from an able-bodied twenty-seven-year old, but it’s true. I didn’t know I found so much worth and security in the way that I looked until I started to notice a difference.

As humans, we note the passing of time in the changes around us. The tree that was once green is now orange, now yellow, now brown and bare. The crack on the stoop starts to grow weeds and crumble. The basil plant gets bigger, the dust on the shelf gets thicker, and the water stain on the ceiling expands to look like a dinosaur. We note these changes with surprise, as if they’ve happened all of a sudden instead of one day at a time.

On Navigating Grief During the Isolation of Quarantine

I read about the third suicide that had happened while we were in quarantine via email from my supervisor.

“I apologize for my absence. As some of you may have heard, my brother committed suicide over the weekend, and my family and I have been grieving this loss.”

I wrote back to the mass email individually saying how sorry I was for her loss, and that I, too, had suffered a loss at this time. Within the last month, I had lost my uncle to a surgery that left him paralyzed for weeks in the hospital. Alone. Without family. And that that had filled my heart with grief in a confusing time that didn’t allow people to gather and grieve the loss of a loved one. Let alone, let them say goodbye.

No Man Is An Island: An Ode to Our Neediness

The last few years of my life—so basically my Full Grown Adult Years—have been a reinforced lesson in this one simple yet slightly-jarring fact: we need each other. I mean, need-NEED each other.

“No man is an island,” says Thomas Merton, and my bae C.S. Lewis backs this up further by writing, “We need others physically, emotionally, intellectually; we need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves.”

We’re meant to be needy, but why is it so hard to acknowledge and accept this?

Say What You Need

Now maybe it wasn’t your family or your upbringing that made you neglect voicing your needs. Maybe it was a toxic relationship or a difficult work environment. Maybe it was someone who told you that your needs were selfish or that the desires of your heart didn’t matter.

Whatever it was, I urge you to identify those people or experiences or situations and start using that knowledge to change.

A Beginner's Guide to the Enneagram

Maybe you, like me, have become curious about the Enneagram because it is popping up everywhere in conversations and on your social media timeline. Maybe you know everything there is to know and have become quite fluent in Ennea-lingo (you even know that there are sub-types!).

Maybe this is the first time you’re ever hearing about this weird test and you’ve spent the last four paragraphs trying to figure out how to even pronounce the word “Enneagram” (In-ee-a-gram, for the record).

No matter where you’re at, we can all use some guidelines when it comes to personality tests, because none of us are immune to over-identifying, self-shaming, and becoming a walking personality-test-fulfilling prophesy. So, without further ado, here are my dos and don’ts of Enneagram-ing.

The Battle to Overcome Your Rejection

Rejection is an issue I’ve had to wrestle hard with over the last three years. Every time Rejection and I had to face off in the boxing arena, I would always end up slammed and pinned down. In boxing, you have ten seconds to get yourself up before the game is over. For me, it took months before I could even peel my head off the floor.

How to Respond to Someone Else's Grief

But this post isn't about my own grief. It's not about the tears I've cried, or the questions I've asked. It’s not about my own days where getting out of bed felt too hard.

It's about a different side of the fight. It's about your mom's grief when she loses her college roommate. And your best friend after she has a miscarriage. It’s about all the people you encounter, telling you about their grief.

Life, HealthHaley KieserOctober 19, 2017Comment

Adjusting to Life As A Former College Athlete

FREE PRINT

magazine Blog

Contact SUBMIT