Exercise
How movement got me through the pandemic and beyond
Like many other people, and perhaps you, I struggle to remember most of 2020. I do remember March 11 of that year with clarity, my last “normal” day. On that morning, I met up with a friend at the Hudson train station. We had theater tickets, purchased months earlier, to see Inheritance. Clark had tried to talk me out of going to the city the night before, showing me the headline of an article in The Atlantic, titled “Cancel Everything.” My friend and I really really wanted to see the play. Couldn’t we do just this thing, this one thing we’d been looking forward to, and then we would retreat till we knew more about the mysterious virus that seemed to be engulfing the world. Already I felt whiny and just a bit petulant, a prequel to the regression that would take hold of me in the next months.
Reality bit while we were on the train. We read the news online and it wasn’t good. It was a seriously stupid idea to sit in a crowded theater, inhaling and exhaling the same air. We ate dinner and stayed overnight in a nearly empty hotel, and the next morning I walked back to Penn Station. I had a medical mask and put it on as I got in line. No one else wore a mask. One guy in front of me had just arrived with boxes stamped with the name of a Mediterranean country. Soon, that country would be overwhelmed with illness, perhaps in part because people there like to hug and kiss each other a lot. Looking at the guy and his boxes, I felt uneasy in such a confined space and stepped outside onto Eighth Avenue.
An ESPN truck was parked on the street and two big guys were nearby, chatting. I couldn’t hear their conversation, what with the traffic, though it was much lighter than on a typical weekday morning. Fewer people on the street, fewer taxis. There was an uneasy spaciousness that at the same time felt suffocating, the decibel level of the city muffled as if a large unseen hand had placed a pillow over its face. I watched the pantomime of the two men, making up dialogue based on their hand movements and body language. There was a sense that the city was blinking off, one light at a time.
In that moment, all I wanted was to be teleported home. I felt like an idiot for ignoring Clark’s advice. One of the guys pulled out a pack of Marlboros, tapped out a cigarette and held the pack towards the other guy, who took one. First guy lit a match that was extinguished by a passing gust. He tried another and the two men leaned towards each other, cupping the flame. Watching this somehow tender scene of male bonding, I knew that it was the last of its kind for some undetermined length of time.
Back home, we hunkered down, like everyone, and within months—in part because I was already used to spending most of my days alone—I became something of a hermit.
My brother and sister-in-law arranged transport out of New York City for my father and his wife to a small weekend house in Connecticut. Temporary, we thought, just a few weeks, or maybe months, at most.
I saw a few friends on the street when we took walks outside, still masked since no one yet understood how the virus spread. I binge-watched “The Great British Baking Show,” learned to make good-enough bread and surprisingly successful puff pastry. I drank a glass of wine every day while listening to the news. Sometimes two. Sometimes more. I missed our kid who was in their Brooklyn apartment banging pots every evening with her neighbors. Roommates scattered and soon our kid was alone with their tuxedo Maine Coon cat. During that summer we visited my father once. We ate outside and there was no hugging or kissing.
By autumn I felt unwell, lethargic, and exhausted. I have always been happy working alone, but this new existence was a different flavor of alone, the opposite of tranquil.
As the year turned, and conspiracy theories took hold, we stayed home, even after getting vaccinations. The only times that felt liberating were on days when we went hiking. It felt good to exhaust my body and breathe cool air. In town we all kept apart. I broke protocol one afternoon to visit a friend I missed so much. She suggested that I join an online Pilates class. As a result, I remember 2021 better than 2020. Three years later these classes still anchor my week. I’ve never been athletic. My dad loves to watch football and baseball, but we were not a sporty family. He grew up in Philadelphia during the Depression, without access to organized school sports. He described summers during ongoing polio scares when his mother forbade him and his brother from going to public playgrounds or swimming pools. In fact, he never learned to swim properly until later in life. He was an infantry soldier in World War Two which was quite enough hiking and camping for one lifetime. I learned my few camping skills at summer camp.
Without parental pressure, I avoided sports myself. For one thing, I started smoking as a teenager. I was sick a lot as a result, with winter head colds that dragged on for weeks, even months. My eye-hand coordination skills were noted by my high school PE teacher who approached after class one day to recruit me for the badminton team. I backed away from her in horror; I was so deeply uncool already and feared that signing up for a sports team would degrade my status even further.
Years later, after I quit smoking for good, I discovered yoga and this practice—physical and mental—got me through a lot during the next years. Off and on, I tried to exercise at a gym, but I’ve never loved the vibe: the bad pop music, the clanking of weights, and worst of all, the banks of monitors with too much news, not enough of it good.
During the lockdown, I tried to take yoga online, but I realized that what I’d most loved about class was the very thing we couldn’t do: share the air and space in quiet communion.
Our Pilates teacher pushed me to wake up earlier than I like, to re-engage with the world and with muscles I didn’t know I had, though I made their acquaintance when they complained. Over months, I felt stronger and liked it. I had more stamina for hiking and living. I gave up the glasses of wine during the week. I became something of a prostelytizer, recruiting other friends so that even if we couldn’t meet in real life, we could enjoy seeing our sweaty faces over Zoom. Even when I’m not sure if I can do it, I know I’ll feel like a super heroine afterwards. Perhaps the best thing that has come from this discipline is that while it requires effort and time, this physical exertion also gives me time—a gift from my body to my brain.
What positive practices, if any, have you brought with you from our time of forced isolation?
Thank you for reading and as with all posts here, I’d love to hear from you! More to follow each Friday at noon. I hope you’ll subscribe and share with other readers. You can find out more about my memoirs Perfection and Eva and Eve here and purchase here. I work privately with writers on creative non-fiction projects. If you are interested, you can contact me through my website: juliemetz.com. A first consultation is free of charge.
You bring it all back, Julie, including a heartfelt glimpse of male bonding before the isolation. Thank you.