Madison, you may have noticed, is a fitness town. We host the Crossfit Games. We host Ironman. We even make it on to national “fittest cities” lists. And Madison loves to run- look at how many races are coming up around here!! So it’s easy to feel like running is the thing to do- a few years ago, Lyn and I used to run together all the time!

It was a great thing we had going- we would meet once a week or so, early in the morning, at one of the two Willy Street Co-ops (Lyn lives near the east side one, I’m on the west side) and check the box off on our fitness for the day. Then, the best part and likely 90% of the motivation for even getting out of bed, we would sit at the Co-op and drink a delicious juice and have breakfast and catch up on, wait for it, Everything and Nothing.

We weren’t particularly fast or trying to win, but we kept on the grind and ran a bunch of local races to keep us motivated. Then, tragedy struck:

While running the Zoo Run Run 10k, a race we had not really trained for well (that summer was sooooo hhhhoooottttt!!), my foot/ankle started to feel very wrong. Lyn was ok with walking, because she realized she forgot to eat for, like, the past 24 hours. We slogged to the finish line, Lyn almost stole a banana straight out of the hand of a random passerby, and we declared defeat over our post-race brunch.

Turns out I had a stress fracture in my 4th metatarsal. I was benched from pretty much everything for 3 months. It worked out, though, because Lyn was also needing to take some time off running, and we were heading into winter anyway. Fast forward to the next spring: we started running again, and had a redemption Zoo Run (just the 5k this time), and I realized something crazy important: I HATE RUNNING, AND THAT’S OK. I hung up my running shoes for good.

While I was rehabbing my foot, I discovered kettlebell training, and fell in love with strength sports. Lyn still runs pretty regularly- it’s fast, she can do it wherever work happens to take her, and she gets an excuse to listen to music (she wouldn’t do it silently, and I concur!!)- but admits she only “tolerates it” and she isn’t planning to run any races or hit PRs, just happy to get it done.

This past winter was rough, for a lot of reasons, and it seems the whole city hid under the covers and ate cheese from December through March, including us. Lyn sent me a message mid-March, and echoed what I had also had on my mind: we need to get back to doing something exercise-y together, and more importantly, we need our weekly-ish breakfast chats back in our lives. I really don’t want to run, and Lyn isn’t particularly jazzed to lift. So what can we do? Well, thanks to Madison being such a fit town, we have options. SO MANY OPTIONS.

Here’s the plan: we are going to cast a wide net and grab any Groupons and introductory offers we can to try all kinds of fitness! We’ve just finished our first class, and we’ll let you know how that went in an upcoming post (along with our opinions on breakfast options). But!! We need your help! What should we call this project? And also, what fitness do you want to see us try?? We are game to try almost everything. Almost. 😉