Not sure yet how I want to label this topic, since "fitness" is pretty broad. I might branch this into sub-topics later, but we'll see how it goes for now.
I try to be active and have a few hobbies that fall into this category, most of which are: weight lifting, bicycling, and roller blading. Not to make it sound like I'm a super-active person, because I'm not - I'm very lazy and computer-addicted, haha. It's more that I try to keep these hobbies in my life that will encourage me to keep moving around. I'm also scared of hurting myself, so I don't jump fully into everything and try to be careful, so my skill progress with some of these things is slow.
Biking is something I've done for years. It's a great sort of "default" exercise outside, and gets you around the neighborhood to just look at the plants and things while moving. My city has a paved bike trail that will take you effectively anywhere you want to go in town, which tends to be where I ride now. Until the last couple years, I used to live next to this big cemetary with wide roads on the side of a small hill, which was great for getting a nice ride in with some fun downhill action as well. When Pokemon Go came out, I bought a phone-holding attachment so I could play while riding, though that game never really worked well with biking. Incredibly frustrating that I couldn't really hatch eggs in that game on a bike - the speed I road was right in that nebulous area where the game decided you were going "too fast" to count as walking, but for whatever reason they still would let you hatch eggs while driving. How is a game all about getting outside and walking around going to penalize you for biking when it doesn't for driving? But anyway, I quit PoGo at the end of 2020, trying to hold onto it during the pandemic by biking alone, but it was too much work to maintain anymore.
The bike trail is also great for roller blading, though it's not my preferred spot. When I can, I try to get one of the tennis courts at the local parks to myself. It's not safe to skate near the nets, but as long as you avoid them, you have a really smooth turf to skate on. I'm still working on my stopping skills, which sounds weird when you hear someone say that, but stopping on skates is its own skill and has different levels of difficulty. You can use the breaks that come attached to one of the boots, but I ended up removing the brake since I would trip over it, and that was far more dangerous. I am able to stop my skates, it just takes a good bit of real estate to do so, and I would like to be able to master the quick stop methods I see people do online. But they're scary for me still, haha. And because I'm not quite there yet, there are spots on the bike trail where I avoid, since they'll lead to me crossing traffic - and I don't really feel safe doing that in those spots without a reliable quick-stop skill.
But the main thing I'm doing for fitness right now, partly because it's winter and cold/snowy where I live, is weight lifting at the gym. I originally started lifting dumbbells at my apartment complex gym room in 2018. They had a basic set of exercises hanging on the wall that I would do one day a week, and I would just follow that, since this workout room didn't offer a lot in terms of equipment and space. In two years, I put on some noticable bicep muscle and was very proud. I've always been an underweight person who wasn't ever really happy with my looks, but putting on some muscle finally helped me realized what made me unhappy with myself. It's not my goal to get ripped, but some muscle would be nice. Though 2020 hit and I stopped going to the gym and lost the progress I'd made over those two years.
I got back into it last year, having moved into my boyfriend's house and no longer having access to a paid-by-my-rent workout room, so I joined a proper gym. I've been working with a personal trainer who's showing me all sorts of things: how to use new equipment, since a lot of them look very strange; how to use proper form; what muscle groups I'm hitting; different exercise setups (like I'm switch from two full-body workouts a week to three workouts using Push/Pull/Legs); etc. I'd lost the progress I'd made from before the pandemic, but I've regained most of what I could do, and I'm working out more muscle groups that I ever did alone. The big gripe I have with all this is, this cuts into the time I'll have for biking/skating once the weather is nice, so hopefully I'll work that out over the spring. My gym also just finished renovating the indoor pool, so I just bought a new swimming suit to hopefully make use of that soon.
I'm sure I'll talk more about the individual hobbies here later on, but I think that's good enough for an intro. Bye for now!
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