Ten Laps

My body tells me no
But I won't quit, cause I want more
Cause I want more.
     - My Body by Young the Giant

It's fifteen degrees outside as I step into the cold. My feet bounce lightly off the pavement as I jog momentarily in place. My breath mists around me. The gym is a six minute walk away. The sweatshirt I'm wearing does almost nothing to keep the wind out. I pull my hood up and start moving.

With the wind, the temperature is below zero.

The gym doors open and the heating inside mercifully washes over me. My face is red and my nose is running, and when the wind blew my hood down I did nothing to fix it, not wanting to take my hands out of my pockets and expose them to the cold. I close my eyes and wait for the chill that runs through my body to pass. I can see the weight room, sparsely populated, through the back of the staircase in front of me. Not yet. I march up the stairs.

It's time to warm up.

Televisions line the cardio room to keep the people endlessly moving in place from getting bored. The Big Bang Theory is on. It's always on. It doesn't matter what gym you are in, what day you go, or what time you get there, if they have a TV, it will be showing The Big Bang Theory. Sheldon's friends are doing him a great disservice by not helping him seek treatment for his obvious social disorders. Everybody has an mp3 player. Nobody is watching. My iPod broke years ago. I listen to the top 40 hits being run methodically through the sound system.

Ten laps, yesterday, I remind myself. Ten laps. Each time around the blue turf that encircles the cardio room and the basketball court is a tenth of a mile. Yesterday I ran one mile. I was running four before the summer break, I growl in my own head. My gym sneakers are old and worn out. This isn't going to help extend their life. The sole slaps the surface, and I'm off.

My legs pump rhythmically in time with my arms. My breath is steady, my eyes set firmly ahead. With each lap around the treadmills and elliptical machines and stretch mats I glimpse at the others doing the same thing I am. I see who is taking it easy and who is pushing themselves, who is following an ingrained routine and who is pursuing a New Year's Resolution. I'm closing in on one year of working out.

I push through another lap.

My knee is better after taking a week off to let it settle. With every step it had felt like it was about to torque itself out of place. I don't think about it as I keep on moving forward. Ten laps yesterday.

Ahead of me is the CrossFit workout of the day. The names of a dozen workouts I never knew existed before run through my mind. Double under. Single arm snatch. Front squat. Toes-to-bar. Burpee. I have a schedule, normally - shoulder day, arm day, chest day, leg day, back day, rest, repeat. My days are filled with sets and reps. Now I alternate, back and forth, one month of muscle groups, one month of CrossFit, and back again. New veins have formed to carry blood to newly-formed muscle. My hands have grown thick calluses from the days I forget to wear gloves. I picture in my mind what I've always imagined I would look like at 100%. I catch a glimpse of myself in the window as I run past. It looks like I'm at 50.

Nine months ago I was at 0. I keep running.

I remember the years I spent looking in the mirror being unsatisfied with what I saw. I remember the years, very recently, where my weight crossed the threshold of 200. I remember struggling to fit into pants I'd owned for years. I remember how that made me feel. I remember how I felt when my weight dropped almost to 160, when I had to buy all new clothes, when I came back to campus after months away and everyone I ran into remarked on how much weight I'd lost and muscle I'd put on. I remember watching the scale tick steadily upwards, and realizing that it wasn't because I was putting on fat. I'm breathing hard. I've lapped a couple using the walking lane three times already. Ten laps yesterday.

My legs are starting to feel the strain. I ignore them.

I know down in the weight room, there are a going to be half a dozen guys bigger than me, stronger than me, who've been doing this a lot longer and a lot more seriously. Athletes, bodybuilders, or just people like me with more years behind them. They look better, they train harder, people stop and stare at them as they do their sets of deadlifts. They show up in pairs, or teams, and I am alone. I remind myself that I'm not competing against them. I'm not trying to be stronger than them. I'm just trying to be stronger than me.

I'm halfway to ten. I push myself forward.

Day by day, rep by rep, lap by lap. Always get stronger. Never weaker. That was my mantra for months. I felt weaker than I ever had, and I told myself there was only one way I was coming out of it. Better than ever. Every day, go further. Lift more. Work harder. If there's weakness, burn through it. If there's pain, deal with it. If I felt hurt, rest, recover, come back stronger. Always stronger. I didn't see results after a week. I didn't see them after a month. I still don't really know if I see them now. So I work harder. I never give up.

The muscles in my legs are telling me to slow down. I choose not to.

Every day, I make a decision. A decision not to sit in my dorm room on my computer. A decision to change into my gym clothes and walk out the door. Just having the clothes on, making the first decision, spurs me forward. I'm already changed, might as well go, I think. It's cold. I just went yesterday. The workout today looks hard. It'll be crowded. It's late. I've got homework. I have to get up early. I'm tired. I can always go tomorrow. I'll get bored. But I've already changed. Too late to turn back now. So I go, and I go, and I go, until I don't even think about the excuses. Until it's such a regular part of my routine that the gym is now an excuse to take myself away from other things. I made that decision. I made the decision to not have an extra dessert, or to drink a soda, or to have another slice of pizza. I made a decision to not quit.

I'm at seven. I decide to keep going.

There's no goal in mind - there's no endgame. There's no result I'm after that I can get frustrated and quit over because I don't see it right away. There's only this body, and how it looks, and how I want it to look, and the knowledge that this is how it gets there. If I work out as hard as I can today and it doesn't work, then I guess I just need to come back and do it again tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that. If I mess up one day, if I can't go, if I'm away for some reason and my schedule gets thrown out of whack, the gym doesn't care. The gym will still be there when I get back. If I find I can't lift as much as I could, can't go as far as I used to, then it's time to work myself back to where I was. There is no overall goal. Every day is the goal. Every day is another block in the foundation, and before you know it, the house is halfway built.

Eight. My chest is heavy, my legs hurt. But I ran ten yesterday. Never weaker. I ran ten yesterday.

I think back to my first run. A friend of mine challenged me to run six miles. Forget how long it takes, don't worry if you have to stop and walk for part of it. Just get it done. Six miles. I could barely run one. So I sucked it up, and I did it. All of it. It wasn't fast, it wasn't pretty, but I didn't stop until I did it. Now that I knew I could do it, I knew I could do it again. With every pump of my legs, every ragged breath, every desperate gasp at the water fountain, I got stronger. I left my weaknesses behind.

Nine laps in and I'm still going strong.

You don't set a goal with some artificial deadline.

You don't compete with anybody else.

You just make the decision to do it.

And then you do it.

And you keep doing it, every day, until there's no such thing as not doing it.

You just get stronger.

I hit ten laps. I ran ten laps yesterday.

So today I do eleven.

I forgot my gloves again. I'm going to be burning calluses into my hands. My arms are going to feel like lead after the dumbbell lifts. I've never even done a toes-to-bar and have no idea if I can. There are sit-ups in today's workout. I hate sit-ups.

When the blood is roaring in your ears, when your body feels too heavy to move, when you're staring at the bar perched over you and have no idea how you intend to move that much weight, when you just can't squeeze out one more pull-up, one more sit-up, one more curl, one more push, one more press, one more lap,

That's exactly when you do it.

When you see the weight lift off the bench, when you get your chin over the bar, when you go back in the locker room, strip your shirt off, look in the mirror and think "yeah, this is good," that's what gets you back the next day. And if you can't do those things, then you work until you can.

I go downstairs and do my workout. My body is exhausted and exhilarated at once. It's still fifteen degrees. Walk back in the cold. Drink a protein shake. Get some sleep.

I'm in the best shape of my life.

Tomorrow I'll do twelve.

Get Healthy for the Future!

An experiment: a soundtrack for this blog post. Go here and listen to that in the background while reading! (There's no video to speak of, so don't feel you're missing anything while not watching.) It's THE WAVE OF THE FUTURE.

Speaking of the future...

I had a thought the other day while riding my bike for some much-needed get-out-of-the-house exercise. It's often said that our technological innovation increases at an accelerating rate. It's not a great leap to believe that within this century, we will see at least a few of the most mind-boggling amazing technologies from science-fiction and futurist prediction:

Space tourism, nanomachines (good ol' nanomachines), AI, teledildonics and giant mind-controlled mechas, virtual reality, mood organs, or, most relevantly to this post, curing aging.

So I thought:
Wouldn't it suck something awful if I got old, decrepit or died before these technologies were achieved?

We (I assume most readers are of my generation) may just be living at just about the cusp. There's no way to tell, of course, but it's entirely possible that these technologies - particularly ones that halt, cure or reverse aging and damage to the body - will be invented and implemented just in time for us to be too damn old to get any benefit from them.

I know I would be damn upset if, when I'm 60, space travel suddenly becomes as affordable and accessible to the average person as a trip to Six Flags... and I can't pass the physical. Meanwhile, folks just ten years younger than me - or folks who are my age or older, but in better health - can not only pass the physical and make the trip, but, thanks to medical improvements, will be able to remain in that state of health for decades and decades, taking weekly trips to Freeside space station to play zero-G hoopball with sexy robots.

So, methought... I better get healthy for the future!

The tricky thing about living when we live now is that people living in the time periods before and after us might be said to have good reason to treat their bodies poorly when they are young. The generations before us could argue that it was better to enjoy your body while you were young - rough it up with sex, drugs, loud music, tattoos and piercings, sports, junk food, weekend-long gaming sessions, etc. - than to be all prim and proper and careful with it, only to find out you'd gotten old anyways and your youth was wasted.

And the generations ahead of us might have the medical technology (easy body repair, mind-body uploading, nanobiomachinermagimechanicals, whatever) to abuse their bodies as badly as they wish, because the damage isn't irreversible.

But we, living now, may just have incentive to really do our bodies good so that we can preserve them until technology allows us to be more reckless.

The tricky thing, again, is that, barring a highly unlikely major breakthrough in the next couple years, we won't know until it's too late to change strategies.

Of course, I'm presenting a false dilemma here. It's not like it's not possible to enjoy yourself, party hearty and often, and still, as is preferred in our culture, keep in good health and keep your body looking good (the incentive being sexual appeal instead of personal health). The question is whether it's worth it to, I don't know, expend the effort to become a strict vegetarian gym-rat Zen monk marathon-runner on the off-chance that, when you turn 63, you'll be able to laugh in the faces of your run-down peers as your still-lithe body is now ready for decades upon decades of life-extended sex, drugs and space-adventuring.

I don't want to go on too long, particularly with all those links, and risk your awesomely retro Kraftwerk awesomeness background track run out, so I'll end somewhat abruptly here, by turning it over to you, Dear Reader, by asking you one question:

When you go about trying to improve your health (exercising, dieting, making New Year's Resolutions), are you doing it more so you can be fit and good-looking for Right Now, or are you doing it so you can be hale and hearty in Your Future?

Best. Discovery. EVER.

So like most people in this obese nation of ours, I struggle with getting in shape. (And more importantly, staying in shape.) I am by no means overweight, I'd just like to be a little bit more trim and toned. I mean, come on, is a little bit of ab definition too much to ask?

And like a lot of people I know, my biggest problem is discipline. I've tried it all, but I can't quite seem to stick with anything. I have DVDs - TaeBo, yoga, pilates, target toning. They sit on my shelf above the TV. I have equipment - resistance bands, free weights, a balance ball. They sit in a drawer beneath my under-utilized DVD shelf. I bought a cheap but effective little stationary bike that I planned to ride three times a week. I think the longest I've ever kept up with that plan was three weeks, which is about 2.5 weeks longer than I kept up with the silly "run a mile every other day" scheme. I even bought new tennis shoes for that one! And don't even get me started on the exercise classes/programs I've signed up for, only to stop showing up after week 4. (Even when "showing up" only required rolling off my couch to do some push ups on the living room floor.)

Tomorrow. I swear I'll work out tomorrow.

But then yesterday I made the discovery of a lifetime. Water aerobics. I love swimming, so my latest attempt at fitness was to sign up for an Abs and Glutes swim class through the Montgomery County Dept. of Recreation. The price came to about $5.25 per class, which, in case you've never looked into group fitness, is insanely cheap. The pool is about 10 minutes from my apartment. How could I go wrong?

I guess this guy could have been my teacher.

As it turns out, I didn't. Water aerobics is the best kind of exercise I've ever tried. It was low impact, so my poor sad knees had no trouble keeping up. The instructor was young and enthusiastic, and he played some pretty awesome tunes. And even though I could feel my body working, you don't get covered in sweat when you're in the middle of a swimming pool. In fact, you feel pretty darned comfortable.

But the best part? The rest of the class was completely made up of old ladies (and one middle-aged dude). Normally in an exercise class I'm surrounded by pert little 18-year-olds who are schooling me on every single move. It makes me feel frustrated and totally insecure. But at a water aerobics class on a Wednesday morning? It's just a bunch of women 40+ who want to have some fun jumping around a pool.

I challenge you to be intimidated when you're surrounded by this.

And it was so fun. I felt great. I left the gym with a huge grin on my face, bummed only that I had to wait a whole week to go back again. And if falling asleep at 9:30 last night is any indication, I got one hell of a decent work out.

Now granted, it's still only week 1, but I can see myself sticking with this class. After all, if I don't show, who's going to bring the age median down by 25 years?