This paper is part of a larger study composed of a 12-month ethnographic field research in Istanbul amongst exercising women in women-only gyms and in public parts and it focuses on the temporal aspect of desiring self-making. It argues that neither desire, nor the desiring self could be formed from scratch. Rather, it ethnographically looks closely at how, in order to diverge from existing temporalities, the present self must go through a prolonged process of reformation involving temporal recalibration. While doing so, it centralizes a two-tiered approach: the first layer develops a relational study of desire while the second layer ethnographically focuses on those relations. Although desire has long been treated as a product of pedagogy, disagreements about how it is formed continue. It has been suggested that desire can be recognized only when it escapes from control, as when dreams reveal forbidden sexual desires, or that desire is defined through its foundational negation or “lack,” again linked to systems of control. In questioning the existing models of desire, the approach carried in this paper treats desire and the desiring self as simultaneously relational and autonomous, entailing the formation of an autonomous desire concomitant with socially acceptable selfhoods. As a result, this paper focuses on relational recalibration, rather than emancipations. On the surface, the autonomy Istanbulite women gain by engaging in exercise may appear to be about reclaiming space: gyms, rooms, parks, streets. Certainly, their insistence on spatial autonomy in the desiring-self-making processes does intersect with the feminist literature on space. However, this paper suggests a more fine-grained approach. Through exercise, women regain control of their own time and movements insofar as they restructure their daily habits. This control, experienced as a form of liberation from former socially-imposed routines that I call time regimes, resynchronizes the body to a newly patterned temporality. By focusing on the changes in Istanbulite women’s time-regimes and daily routines, this paper analyses changes, and rhythms in the way they reflect women’s desire to form a new selfhood by using exercise as an “altchronic practice”. These altchronic practices alter former temporalities to form new, idiosyncratic ones suited to the new self. By examining exercise as an embodied experience with temporal patterns, beats, and rhythms, the paper studies the entangled aspect of enjoyment, how women experience exercise as desirable, and how it can alter the individual woman’s relationship with her lifestyle and her society.