There is some dispute as to exactly when Quitters Day is.
Some places will tell you it’s the second Friday of January. Others point to the clunkier-named Ditch New Year’s Resolution Day as occurring on Jan. 17. It appears that Quitters Day was coined by the fitness app Strava, determined by the day that the New Year’s surge in exercise drops off. Whatever the exact date, the reason for its existence is obvious enough to anyone who has set too ambitious of a goal to start suddenly exercising in ways they are neither physically nor mentally prepared to make routine, as we did when we purchased a gym membership in 2019. We went once.
Like suddenly eliminating your alcohol intake, adopting a drastic athletic lifestyle change without consideration is setting yourself up for failure. Many of us have experienced this first-hand, along with the self-loathing that can follow. What if the better approach is not just about building habits and routines, but actually reconsidering entirely what it means to be active, and reexamining our motivations?
According to the CDC, more than 60% of American adults do not get enough exercise. That number can be as high as 75 or even 80%, depending on the ominous news article of the day. A 2015 Harvard study showed that, while three-quarters of Americans played sports as kids, only one-quarter still did as adults. Also notable within that study — 40% of adults up to age 25 still played, but that number dropped to 26% for the 26-49 age group, and 20% from age 50 and up.
There was also a stark split across socioeconomic backgrounds. Only 15% of adults with household incomes below $25,000 (roughly $31,000 in today’s dollars) played sports, compared to 37% of those making at least $75,000 ($92,600). Leisure time is an often-overlooked luxury, at least for those afforded it.
Perhaps the most striking result from the study for me personally had to do with motivation. Only 23% who play sports said they do so for health-related reasons, such as staying in shape or losing weight. Meanwhile, 55% said they do so for personal enjoyment. As we reach the time in January when noble, but ill-conceived gym membership purchases sour from ambition to regret — as ours did a few years back — that’s really worth considering.
If you’ve struggled with the same inability to stick with a form of physical activity, ask yourself:
Was I gaining personal enjoyment out of it?
If not, what kind of activity would provide that?
Maybe you love running. GFY. (That stands for “good for you.” Trust me. Don’t look it up. Definitely don’t go to Urban Dictionary. Nope.) Many of us, myself included, very much do not enjoy it. I was a high school track and cross country runner and I could rarely stay healthy then, much less 25 years later. If I run more than a few miles more than a couple times a week, I will get hurt. I’ve tried many different shoes, orthotics, inserts, you name it. It doesn’t matter.
Plus, I mostly do not enjoy the actual act of running, outside of the occasional change from my routine as a cyclist. I’m a firm believer that exercise should be enjoyable. Maybe there is some aspect you don’t love — I’ll never really be able to do core workouts “for fun” — but by and large, any activity you regularly engage in only works long-term as something you look forward to, rather than as something you dread as an obligation.
There is no “correct” activity. But perhaps I, or those in the interviews below, can give you some inspiration to find yours. In my last newsroom, where I was a sports editor, I reported on a list of recreational sports activities so long and diverse that I am almost certainly forgetting a good number of them, but which included:
For a lot of people I know, staying active means packaging their physical activity in some form of competition — as playing sports, as in the Harvard study, rather than as simply “exercising.” But for three people who I spoke to for this entry, I was struck by a common, unexpected theme.
When Don Grage joined the UC Irvine downhill ski team in the mid-1980s, he stumbled haphazardly into a lifelong love affair. Irvine is in Orange County, by the beach, a couple hours from the mountains. As such, the team would only travel to actually ski on the weekends, opting instead on weekdays for an hour in the gym, followed by an hour playing a sport Grage had never heard of: Ultimate frisbee. He took to it immediately.
“I mentioned to somebody on the team, ‘This would be such a fantastic spectator sport, if anybody ever turned it into something,’” he recalled.
Grage continued to play in rec leagues in Los Angeles during and after college, and after moving to the D.C. area with the Washington Area Frisbee Club. He played as many as three games a week for years, while also mountain biking, each activity helping him stay in shape for the other. Nearly 30 years after discovering the sport by accident, he bought a professional team, the DC Breeze, for which he serves as Managing Partner.
Grage’s advice when seeking out a sport is to really hone in on what compels you to it, and to do your homework.
“The first thing to think about is, what interests you the most?” he said, and then to go learn about it from watching on TV or YouTube. “It just makes it more fun when you understand the game far better than the skill level you’ve achieved to that point.”
His point applies far beyond Ultimate — there is an incredible amount of value, in many games, in simply knowing where to be on the field of play at any given time. But Grage values other aspects of the sport.
“The qualities of Ultimate that I really, really like are that it is truly a combination of the kind of talents that would make you good at other sports: strong aerobic capability, changing direction, thinking about the entire field, thinking about your opponent,” he said. “And it only takes a couple hours, or even an hour, to have a really intense amount of exercise.”
Ironically, Grage’s professional involvement with Ultimate — alongside his full-time job running an IT firm — meant he no longer had the time to play recreationally. But he has gone back to a childhood sport, tennis, in recent years, spurred by its pandemic-friendly nature.
“I do miss playing (Ultimate), and I absolutely would like to get it back integrated into my life,” he said. “But now that I haven’t played it for six or seven years, and I’m six or seven years older, I’m kind of nervous about getting out there with a bunch of 30-somethings that have been playing for all the years that I haven’t been playing.”
Age has not been a concern for Zach Furness, to say the least.
A soccer and basketball player through high school, he picked up rugby in college and played that until he settled down and got married. In early adulthood, he’d meet with some of his buddies once a week to rent a gym and play some pickup basketball. But one day, after his kids had gone off to college, he got a call from a friend who asked if he might want to join his novice-level hockey team. Ice hockey.
Furness was 56 at the time. He hadn’t stepped on an ice rink in at least a decade. Naturally, he said yes.
“I would say that my skating ability was not good,” he laughed. “I had a significant curve to overcome.”
With 40-and-up masters teams and A-through-D levels of competition, he had the time to learn, though, without being in over his head.
“I realized the only way to get better was to put in the time, and that’s what I did,” he said.
As he gained his sea legs, Furness got asked to join a second team. So he did. Pretty soon, he found himself subbing in on a third team. Now, it’s a running joke with his wife how many different uniforms will show up in the laundry room.
“There are literally five different jerseys in there now for teams that I’m either full-time on or a substitute on,” he said.
While Furness has obviously taken to the game itself, the element of community is what has solidified hockey as a crucial part of his life.
“You play a game, and then afterward you go and sit in the parking lot, or wherever, and have a couple beers,” he said. “You get to know these people on a personal level. You understand their history, their stories. You become friends with a lot of these folks.”
“It is really as much a social component as it is an athletic one.”
Mark Antoniewicz found his own community a little earlier in life. He grew up in the Midwest, Big 10 college town of Madison, Wisconsin, where football was king, but basketball wasn’t all that far behind. He played both in high school, until an L4/5 stress fracture in his spine — a long-term, overuse injury — sidelined him for his senior hoops season. An all-city wide receiver, he was able to get UConn head football coach Randy Edsall’s attention and encouragement to walk on. But when he arrived on campus after being sidelined for nine months, his calculus changed.
“I didn’t want to have to gain 30 pounds of muscle just to see a couple downs in a couple years,” he said, and he came to a crucial realization. “I liked basketball better.”
UConn had an incredible hoops environment, with a powerhouse program coming off a recent national title. Antoniewicz got to play in pickup and intramural games with future NBA stars like Emeka Okafor and Ben Gordon, cementing a lifelong love for the game. It carried over to his post-college move to Washington D.C. in 2006, where he found community once again at the Kalorama courts on 18th St NW.
“The beauty about basketball is that it never takes that long,” he said. “You can always find a court, wherever you are in the world.”
Those courts were a melting pot of cultures, including a heavy international presence, ranging from high schoolers through middle-aged locals.
“My first friends in D.C. were those guys, and I still consider many of them my best friends,” said Antoniewicz.
Through those connections, he was able to travel to Guatemala with a youth leadership and development non-profit. Eventually, he even took over as the president of the Adams Morgan Basketball Association, putting on tournaments at those same courts back in the mid-2010s. Now, he still plays on a competitive rec league team, but has been out the last two months with a broken finger, his longest break since high school. He’s been staying in shape, itching to get back on the court with his friends.
“I always come back to community,” he said. “Having sports and having a base in your life to always go back to, where the rules of the sport don’t change. It’s part nostalgic, because it brings you back to your youth. I think people neglect that and stop playing sports.”
Like the others, he’s used basketball to improve his physical and mental health. But he’s never seen it as “exercise.”
“It encouraged me to eat better, sleep better, work out. But it didn’t seem to me like a chore,” he said. “I’m going to be playing forever. I’m never going to get sick of getting out there and throwing a good pass to someone, or making a three, or whatever it is.”
For the parents among you looking for that last bit of motivation to get active again, perhaps consider what it would mean to be able to play a sport with your child. For Antoniewicz, who had two young sons, that’s what he’s most looking forward to at this point (other than dunking at age 40).
“I’m trying to pass that feeling to them,” he said. “I’m not forcing it, but you want them to be a part of your journey, your story with the sport.”
Hockey has already provided that for Furness. During the pandemic, one of his sons was back at home taking classes virtually, and took his dad up on an invitation to join the team. His other son came back on a break and did the same, leading to the opportunity for the three of them to share the ice together.
“I had both of them playing with me on the same line,” said Furness. “And it was just one of those highlights that you’ll remember for your entire life.”