Walking Away from the Wellness Industrial Complex

My commute became my gym, until I realized it was therapy.

Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash

Three years ago, I achieved a personal dream which later became a lifeline: I found a new apartment and a new job, the distance between which allowed me to walk to work. After taking the subway to an office under a fluorescent glare, I would now take a literal walk in the park to classrooms where I would teach.

From the west side of Manhattan to the east side, my commute led me diagonally through Central Park -- past the sparkling Reservoir and a grove of pine trees where men did chin-ups, around the Great Lawn where Canadian geese landed in the spring -- and ultimately ushered me out in the shadow of three bronze bears, able to see the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the exquisite luxury of walking to a job I liked, I lost thirty pounds. The new habit also redefined my relationship with "fitness," by which I mean the massive, multibillion-dollar industry that sells water bottles, leggings, indoor exercise classes, gym memberships, cleanses, and dreams of chiseled bodily perfection.

Even as I planned to walk to my new job, I would have scoffed at the suggestion that it would "count" as exercise. I wonder who else feels this way -- perhaps other women in their early thirties and late twenties, who live in cities packed with gyms, who perhaps were athletes in high school and who have come of age in the era of ubiquitous yoga classes. In my twenties, I paid good money to have dozens of interchangeably serene, crop-topped waifs guide me into a quivering crow pose while sweat dripped onto my mat. I felt the burn in my quads in a sprint on the rowing machine, watched myself clapping and doing the grapevine-left in a studio mirror with other Zumba ladies, and coached myself past the ninth mile in five or six half marathons. For years, I was aware of myself as burning calories (never enough calories, of course), toning, and optimizing with salads. This is another way of saying that I'd also been aware of myself as calorie consuming, failing to tone, and underperforming with Thai food. I knew how fitness felt, and it felt like suffering. That's how I knew I was doing it right. Walking seemed so… easy. So nice. Surely it didn't count. If I was only walking, I was probably not trying hard enough. In this new commute, I told myself I just wanted more sunlight. I figured I still needed a way to work out for real. 

Then I started this ritual of slowly walking for an hour twice a day, and I had the completely alien experience of being tired at the end of it. Not the exclusively emotional exhaustion of smiling and biting my tongue and editing emails to be more courteous and gentle, but actual physical fatigue, as if I'd moved (though I did not yet feel comfortable with this word) enough. It was pleasant. 

I started, and it sounds scandalous to myself even now, cutting myself a break on the exercise front. I somehow accrued enough endorphins, enough days in a row, that I became a person who didn't have to summon a herculean will to change into leggings and take myself on a run. I didn't go running. I didn't navigate an app to sign up for a class and pack a bag of toiletries. I stopped online shopping for workout clothes in the hopes that they would discipline me and disguise my body to look better. My fitness wasn't limited any longer to furious forty-minute bursts of activity in $80 leggings and a bra that resembled a bulletproof vest. 

Instead, my life now just included movement. The fitness industry abruptly had less to offer me. A walking commute made me realize that, until this point, I had a nasty, critical voice inside, urging me to find something more demanding to do, telling me that this run wasn't enough, nor was this yoga class, nor were these minutes in plank position. Before, when I lived in Washington DC, I'd drive home and parallel park, then rush over to yoga class in the evening after work. I'd still feel insufficient, like I should be doing more. Walking to and from work now tired me out properly, and the only special gear I needed were comfortable shoes and an umbrella. It feels strange to realize something so simple. I realize the enormous privilege and rarity of living in a place where walking to work is even possible. But I'll just tell you what happened: walking to work nudged me gently out from under the manicured thumb of the wellness industrial complex. I could stop rushing to classes, stop hatefully examining my reflection in a studio mirror, stop wearing a girdle masked as workout gear, listen to the trees, and relax a little. 

Before the city went into lockdown in March of 2020, I had that commute for a school year and a half. I must have walked my route, 2.6 miles each way most weekdays, at least 400 times. It let me get to know my parts of Manhattan, and it gave me stamina to explore further. 

In the first months of pandemic lockdown, I read about the job losses and the infection rates, the cabin fever and the shuttering gyms. I thought about all those missing endorphins, of people not able to run on the treadmill nor go to a Zumba class nor stack plates on a lat pull-down machine. I was grateful, chiefly, that I lived alone and would risk only myself by going outside, but also that my non-gym was still open: the gravel path was still out there and the trees still shaded it.

This past year, most New Yorkers I know have been walking a little more, and I've been reading about going easier on ourselves and adjusting our expectations while we live under more or less constant invisible threat. You are doing enough, we are reminded. You do not have to learn Mandarin this year, write King Lear, attain a six-pack, or even become a master baker. These things are simply not required, and worrying about being "productive enough" is an extraordinarily privileged worry, just as was my old preoccupation with going to "enough yoga classes." 

The school where I work is now partially open, so I walk there a few times a week in a mask to teach my (masked) students in desks six feet apart. The walk is meditative. It’s preparatory, a chance to think about my students  and what they are going through as children in a scary time. It’s also a time to cool down on the way home, when I'm frustrated with all the normal things kids do in school (let their attention wander, fidget, neglect their homework, interrupt each other, cheat). I adjust my expectations and remind myself to be especially kind with them this year. 

Three years ago, I started walking to get to work. Walking became a means to shed real weight, but also to loosen the hold of viciously impossible expectations about my body, what it "should" look like and how expensive classes and clothes could fix it. In the last year I've walked to feel more human: to get the sunshine and fresh air, to see my friends, and to exercise in a way that feels good, not as if it's a contest I'm always losing. I've been walking for sanity, as many of us have, but also as a way of continuing to be kind to myself. I feel as if I've been conducting a secret, somewhat crackpot experiment where at the end of the day, even a day when I was only a teacher, not a great teacher, sometimes I still tell myself that I'm doing enough. I can highly recommend the feeling. It's one I could imagine holding onto even as the city begins to open up safely again -- a feeling like a stone plucked from a river, fresh, but just the right weight in my pocket as I circle the park again. 

Sarah Kate Neall is from Signal Mountain, Tennessee. She likes city walks, strong coffee, and people who take the trouble to call her by her double name. She lives and teaches in New York.