You read the next question in the exercise survey and shake your head. Not because the survey’s already taken far too long and you’re only halfway through it, but because this question has a painfully obvious answer.

You scribble down “A lack of time” and wonder why any pollster would bother to ask “If you don’t exercise as much as you’d like, why is that so?” For if that question leads to 500 responses, you feel it’s safe to assume 475 of them will be the same as yours.

It’s a fair assumption, one I hold, too. But my assumptions on the matter don’t end there.

I also suspect that in more instances than you might ever imagine the answer is a lie.

Yet surveys allow for anonymity, if you choose. So why choose to lie?

Because it’s convenient, eases the conscience, and keeps you from admitting the real reason. You don’t lack time; you lack energy.

And once again, my assumptions don’t end there. In a group of 500 exercisers who — after a good hard look in the mirror — actually do confess to lacking the energy to exercise more, I bet 450 are confessing falsely. For those “good hard looks” are not into their souls but a funhouse mirror.

The type you find at a carnival. The type designed to distort things.

And I believe you’re inclined to use that sort of a mirror when you assess your energy for exercising — and much else as well. I make this final assumption because this inclination had been mine.

Until, that is, I read Michael A. Singer’s The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself (New Harbinger, 2007) — and then reread the chapter titled “Infinite Energy” again and again.

Even though that title still strikes me as hyperbole, I kept rereading it because I found I had more energy after doing so for just about everything, especially my favorite form of exercise. But before we delve into that, here’s a synopsis of the chapter.

Singer believes the reason you don’t have energy all the time is not because you lack it but because you block it “by closing your heart.” Now if that phrase is a bit too sugary and touchy-feely for you, join the club.

In whatever way you choose to phrase it, though, the idea reveals a fundamental truth: That you do possess a “phenomenal” amount of energy inside you [that] “doesn’t come from food and it doesn’t come from sleep,” but if you stay “open” to it, it “restores, replenishes, and recharges you.” And yes, the idea that such energy results from “openness and receptivity” is also syrupy and soppy.

The hypothetical example Singer uses to establish such schmaltz, however, is as matter of fact as it is true.

You’re in your twenties and your significant other has just broken up with you, which has sapped you, it seems, of all energy. “You can hardly get out of bed, so you just sleep all the time.”

After three months of being “simply too tired to do anything,” you get a phone call. It’s from your ex who wants to be a couple again.

“Practically instantaneous[ly],” Singers writes, you have so much energy “it blows you away.”

That’s no lie, but I’d be lying to claim Singer’s hypothetical has not happened to me at least a time or two. And lying again if I professed to be anything less than blown away when he accurately assesses what I “really” want out of life (and can only assume you do too).

“To feel enthusiasm, joy, and love,” — which he believes anyone can have by “learn[ing] to stay open, no matter what.”

The truth, though, is Singer never fully reveals how to do this. But he does say the “ultimate trick” to staying open “is not to close,” so I’ll share the trick I’ve been using to stay open to riding on those days I seemingly lack the energy to do so.

Which, given my age and my injury history, is far more often than not.

You could find it more sugary and touch-feely than Singer’s words, however. That’s because I simply recall something cutesy my five-year-old niece said to me a few weeks after I gave her a big-girl bicycle, and we’d pedaled two blocks to a park.

“Race me, race me, Uncle KK.”

She did so even though I’d hammered home to her that we’d be doing no additional riding, that she was going to play on the swings and slides. I’d hammered that home because I was feeling absolutely hammered from riding four-plus hours that morning.

But how could a caring uncle hoping to foster in his niece a love of exercise not accept her challenge?

So the race began. After 15 minutes of soft pedaling my mountain bike in the granny gear, my legs, unexpectedly, felt really good.

And really good energy is what I’ve been getting after recalling that story as a way to “stay open” to riding on mornings when I feel a lack of it.

Now I won’t lie to you and support Singer’s claim that energy is infinite, only that this much is true. Before reading Singer’s book about five weeks ago, I had been riding an average of just over 11 hours per week this year.

Since using the aforementioned story “to keep my heart from closing,” I’ve averaged just over 13 hours per week.

Something worth considering the next time you’re wondering whether you could be exercising more.