Beyond Selidor

I recognise some of what you describe here (I wasn't anywhere near as active as you, but I did go to some sports growing up), but I come at it from a different perspective: executive function (or dysfunction).

As a child, going to sports regularly, for me wasn't a skill so much as it was something that was taken care of for me by my parents. they enrolled me, paid the fees, made sure my clothes were washed and ready, got me there, picked me up again, and so on. I didn't have to do anything to make it happen. I stopped doing any kind of extracurricular sports as soon as I had to take on some of those responsibilities myself, and the last time I was truly in good shape and physically active was the two years I spent at boarding school ages 15-17, because they scheduled and enforced morning runs and PE/other sports several times per week. the only thing I had to take care of myself those two years was my own laundry. and all of that is in addition to all the other things that are taken care of for you when you're a kid such as meals and schedules.

As an adult, making exercise happen and as a regular habit is very very hard, because now I have to take care of all those things myself. I have to make every single decision in my life by myself and then carry it out. it's a lot! I don't understand how so many people can just get on with it - it's such a struggle for me in *every* aspect of my life. And just exercise alone - nobody is helping me with any of it - timetabling it, paying for it, making it accessible. and I just don't have the energy, most of the time. If it requires effort to go someplace, it's not happening (unless a friend is roping me into it, in which case it becomes a 'date with a friend' thing, and uses different executive spoons). the fear of losing money if I don't go (if I'm paying for, say, a gym membership) isn't enough of an external motivator to bypass all the other steps, so every time I try, I cancel the membership as soon as it stops working after the initial few weeks of stubborn determination to see it through this time. I have been trying many things on-off for the past fifteen ish years and none of it has worked for more than 2 months.

I have started a Chloe Ting routine of sorts - or more like, I'm experimenting with it to find a way to make it stick. I don't expect I'll be able to keep it up for more than two months, no matter how much I want to, or need it to (since my motivation this time is my health, and my goal is to become pain free). I'm identifying and cutting all the corners possible to try to make this work, because nobody is helping me with it. so an example is, I'd like exercise to be the first thing I do in the day since I dislike doing it in the evenings, but realistically that's never going to work out for me except on weekends because I'm never going to be able to have a routine where I get up early enough to do it, since I already feel like I'm getting up too early just to go to work. at boarding school I didn't have this problem because if we weren't outside at 06:50 at the latest to start our runs, we would be chased out of our beds, not that I ever was - just the fact it was already timetabled for me was enough. all I had to do was put on my running clothes and shoes and go. I don't see this exercise routine building as a skill to be learned or re-learned, but a problem of executive function that needs to be solved in a way that will work long term. stubbornness only gets me so far.