Before there was air conditioning, there was the outdoors. As a kid, I'd play outside in the woods near our house and push neighbor kids into the creek. I'd run around the yard at night chasing lightning bugs to trap in a jar. I'd pedal my bike as fast as I could through the neighborhood, zipping through circular driveways and hurdling down hills. It was great fun, except for the time I smashed my face into the concrete at the bottom of a big hill. And even then, getting three stitches in my lip made me seem hardcore to the rest of the second graders.

As I got older, they invented something called "the Internet." I started spending more time reading bad X-Files fanfiction online than chasing the neighbor kids into the creek. Cable television and Atari games were at least as entertaining as the box turtle we caught in a cardboard box at the creek. I started going outside less and less. Outside was where the bugs were after all, and most of them did not light up when I tapped them. They were just creepy and crawly and bit me.

When I decided I needed to lose weight, exercise was a required task and one I didn't much look forward to. But I realized being a pale, morbidly obese hermit wasn't the best life choice, so I walked inside on a treadmill anyway. After a year and a half of that monotony, I started to walk outdoors. As I got thinner, I could start biking down my neighborhood trail and even run for spurts across the bridge over the small river near my house.

As I was hurdling down the path it occurred to me that exercise actually could be fun, just like it was fun to spin around in the backyard until I was dizzy or to hop through the sprinkler in the summer heat. Chasing boys during a game of tag in my youth surely burned off the calories I'd eaten from half-melted ice cream cones, but I wasn't stumbling barefoot through the grass because I needed to get in some cardio that day. I did it because it was fun.

When you don't feel like exercising, try to get back in touch with that inner child. You might end up having fun, and you will always have a good excuse to have an ice cream cone afterwards. --Jennette Fulda