At some point when I was young, I came to believe you could be either smart or athletic. I chose smart. Now, I think that was a false choice, causing me to subconsciously give up on my body.

Looking back, I’m really glady middle and high schools made participation in extracurricular sports a requirement, even though I hated it at the time. Because even though I felt like the lazy slob compared to a lot of the people on other teams we played, once I got to college and beyond, especially considering I’m in a technical field, I realized that I was actually fairly athletic, relatively speaking, and had an inflated idea of what most people did.