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By Sara Moniuszko
/ CBS News
Want to work out like a first lady? Jill Biden is spilling all the details on her fitness routine.
In a cover interview for the upcoming issue of Women’s Health, the 72-year-old told the magazine she works out most mornings — and her workouts involve an early alarm.
When at the White House, she’s up by 5:45 a.m. to feed the cats, walk the dog and catch the sunrise, and while traveling — such as during her April trip to Denver — she’s ready to go in workout clothes by 6:30 a.m., the outlet reports.
What kind of exercise gets Biden moving? Cycling and jogging top the list.
While traveling, she sticks to boutique fitness studios for spinning and barre classes.
“This is just like any morning on the road: sweating is nonnegotiable, and everyone — security, communications, aides – is more than welcome to join in,” the cover story’s author Liz Plosser writes of a motorcade-assisted trip to a Denver SoulCycle. “Soon we’re in the studio clipping in with Secret Service agents and aides on their own bikes, Beyoncé blaring.”
While at home, Biden can hop on her Peloton or make running outside work.
Because it’s difficult to arrange for the security required for her to run the sidewalks of D.C., she sticks to jogging in the White House driveway, according to the outlet.
And on vacation, including trips to the Bidens’ Rehoboth Beach home, the avid cycler puts wheels to pavement on an actual bike.
Biden says exercise is one of the only things she does entirely for herself and she’s mastered being present in the moment.
“I need to be with myself and find inner strength so I can be strong for everyone else,” she says.
Exercise has been a part of the first lady’s life since she was a child who liked to roller skate. She took up ice skating in college and enjoyed swimming while pregnant with daughter Ashley.
She wrote in her memoir that she kept a pair of running shoes by the front door of their house in Wilmington, Delaware, when Ashley was a teenager.
“Whenever she and I would get into an argument, I’d put on those shoes to go running and calm myself down,” she wrote. “We argued so much, I became a marathon runner.”
And in 1998, she finished the Marine Corps Marathon.
The September Women’s Health, the first issue to feature a U.S. first lady on its cover, hits newsstands on Aug. 15.
-The Associated Press contributed to this report.
First published on August 1, 2023 / 11:17 AM
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