The Old Version of “In Shape”
For years, I ran half-marathons. I raised four boys, kept a busy household running, showed up for my community, and still found time to train. If you’d asked me back then what “healthy” looked like, I would have pointed at all of it — the mileage, the schedule, the sheer amount I could carry without dropping anything. I was passionate about health and fitness, and it genuinely mattered to me — it wasn’t something I took lightly.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I was already running on empty. The body underneath all that output was quietly breaking down, and I was too busy being capable to notice. That’s the part that’s hard to explain to people who haven’t lived it — how you can be genuinely strong in some ways and genuinely unraveling in others, at the exact same time, without any outward sign that anything is wrong.
I share that not to brag about the old version of me. Honestly, some days I look back and wonder how much of that was strength and how much was just not knowing how to stop. I share it because I think a lot of women — maybe you included — measure themselves against a version of “fit” that looks a lot like who I used to be. A version built on output, endurance, and never slowing down. I want to tell you what actually changed, and why I don’t measure myself that way anymore.
When Walking Became the Whole Workout
There was a stretch of time when I couldn’t walk without a cane. Then I needed a walker. Getting from the bed to the bathroom some mornings took real effort and help I couldn’t do without. The idea of running a mile, let alone thirteen of them, wasn’t even on the table. It wasn’t a goal I’d shelved for later. It belonged to a different universe entirely — one I genuinely wasn’t sure I’d ever get back to.
When I started rebuilding, movement didn’t look anything like training. It looked like Pilates done lying in bed, because I couldn’t get down to the floor and, more importantly, couldn’t guarantee I’d get back up on my own. It looked like small, careful, unglamorous motion — the kind that doesn’t photograph well for social media and doesn’t sound impressive when you say it out loud at a party. Nobody’s handing out medals for bed Pilates.
And here’s the thing I actually want you to sit with: those tiny movements counted just as much as the half-marathons ever did. Maybe more. Because they were honest. They were exactly matched to what my body could actually do that day, not what I wished it could do, not what I used to be able to do, not what I thought I should be able to do by now. Just what was actually true, in that moment, and I moved within that truth instead of fighting against it.
I Wasn’t Stoic About It
I want to be honest about something, because I think the “and then I found peace with it” version of this story does a disservice to anyone actually living through it: I did not calmly accept any of this. Not at first, and not for a long time.
For a while, I didn’t have to. In the beginning, the medications worked well enough that I could feel mostly like myself — and if I’m honest, I let that convince me nothing was really wrong. It’s a strange kind of denial, one that doesn’t feel like denial while you’re in it. I wasn’t ignoring symptoms; I genuinely felt okay, so it was easy to quietly set the diagnosis aside and keep living like it wasn’t really part of my story. That worked, more or less, until it didn’t. A few years ago, my health started falling apart in a way I couldn’t set aside anymore, and everything I’d been avoiding caught up with me all at once.
I was angry. Genuinely, deeply angry — at my body, at the unfairness of it, at the fact that I’d spent years doing what I thought “healthy” required, running the miles and showing up for everyone, only to end up unable to walk to the bathroom without help. It felt like betrayal. I had done the work, or so I believed, and my body had done this to me anyway.
I grieved the version of me that used to run half-marathons the same way you’d grieve losing a person — because in a real sense, I had lost her. There was sadness in that, real sadness, not the tidy kind that resolves in a few weeks. There were stages I moved through, out of order and sometimes backward, the way grief actually works instead of the way we wish it worked.
I share this because if you’re in the angry stage, or the sad stage, or the “why is this happening to me when I did everything right” stage — that’s not a detour on the way to healing. That’s part of it. I didn’t skip that part to get here, and I don’t think anyone genuinely does. What changed wasn’t that the anger and grief disappeared one day. It’s that, slowly, they stopped being the only thing I felt.
Redefining What “Counts”
Somewhere in the middle of all that, I had to quietly let go of a belief I didn’t even know I was carrying — that movement only “counted” if it was hard, sweaty, and measurable in miles or minutes or how many people were impressed by it. That belief works fine when your body cooperates. It falls apart completely when it doesn’t, and for a long time, mine didn’t.
What replaced it was something much simpler, though it took me a long time to actually believe it: movement counts if it meets the body you actually have today, not the body you used to have and not the body you wish you had. A five-minute stretch on a hard day is not a lesser version of a workout. It’s the correctly-sized version of a workout for that day. Comparing it to what I used to be capable of was never a fair measurement — I was comparing a body in crisis to a body that hadn’t yet been tested.
This wasn’t just a private mindset shift, either. It changed how I actually moved through recovery, day by day. I graduated from bed Pilates to gentle daily movement, then to something like senior aerobics, and eventually, by June of last year, back into an actual gym. Walking was still hard. Some days it still is, honestly. But I kept going, in whatever size the day allowed — sometimes five minutes, sometimes forty — and that consistency mattered more than any single session ever did. Progress, it turns out, doesn’t require every day to look impressive. It just requires most days to happen at all.
Strength Isn’t Always Loud
If you’re in a season where your version of movement looks nothing like it used to — where a short walk feels like a genuine accomplishment, where you’re doing exercises lying down instead of standing up, where “working out” now means five careful minutes instead of an hour — I want you to know that’s not a smaller version of strength. It’s still strength. It might honestly be the truest version of it, because it’s built without the ego of comparison. Just the honest effort of showing up for the body you actually have, again and again, whether or not anyone’s watching.
I think a lot of us carry a quiet shame around this — like slowing down is admitting defeat, like a modest movement day means we’ve somehow failed. I want to push back on that directly. There is nothing weak about meeting your body honestly. The weakness, if there is any, is in pretending you’re somewhere you’re not and paying for it later.
Where I Am Now
I’m stronger now than I’ve been in years. Not because I got back to running half-marathons — I haven’t, and I’m genuinely not sure I need to. That old version of strength was built on a foundation that eventually gave out. This version is built on something sturdier: the practice of actually listening to my body and moving with it instead of against it, day after day, whatever that day happens to allow.
If today’s version of movement for you is a walk around the block, that’s not the consolation prize while you wait to get back to “real” exercise. That’s not a placeholder for something better. That is the win, in full, exactly as it is.