Sarah Cypher

WARNING: Attempts to be a lone kicker/screamer will fail. Your training buddies, spouse, partner, or significant other must be enthusiastically committed to Ironman, ultra-marathon, or Xterra racing, have goals, and follow a strict training plan.

1. Commit to fitness, but refuse to form specific goals or said training plan.

2. Attempt to complete your partner’s workouts, especially as they increase in duration and intensity, but only on days when you feel like it. (Contravening factors may include fatigue, lack of interest, sore legs, hangnails, and clouds.)

3. Develop a robust OCD complex about exercising and a neurotic fear of being left behind.

4. Buy a heart rate monitor. Panic when your number looks too high, and back off.

5. Quit often, but only when you’re at the far side of an eight-mile loop. Un-quit when you get bored of walking.

6. Move to a neighborhood where all “convenient” run routes begin uphill.

7. Lift weights as much as possible. The workout yields the most minutes of sitting and doing nothing per hour of your time.

8. Place a spin bike in the apartment building’s basement. You can exert yourself in cool darkness, entertain yourself by visually cataloging the neighbors’ belongings, and startle anyone who comes downstairs to do laundry (unless they expect to find a sweaty person humming Lady Gaga next to their boxes of stuff). But on the bright side, the basement is a great place to feel sorry for yourself as you suffer through anaerobic threshold workouts.

9. Relentlessly berate yourself for slowness, tiredness, social awkwardness–anything will do–as your partner/spouse/training group tackles another hill interval. Follow. Repeat. Otherwise you’ll be left behind.

10. Reestablish your relationship with swimming. It is the only place where you don’t have to listen to Lady Gaga, commercials, and annoying cell phone ring tones. Listen to your breathing, and rejoice in the fact that you aren’t running, biking, or grunting through Sisyphean weights workouts. Just try not to pick the lane with the snorkler.

11. Sign up for many inexpensive half-marathons. At mile eight of each, remind yourself that you will never, ever, under any circumstance, sign up for a marathon, Ironman triathlon, or other extremely expensive race.

12. Trust your OCD to carry you through this routine, such as it is, for months. Attain a PR by finishing fifteen seconds behind your spouse/partner/training pal at the 2010 Race for the Roses, to complete the half-marathon course in 1 hour, 55 minutes, 41 seconds.