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.

The Working Man's Roundtable

Work. As inevitable as death and reality television. In order to survive and prosper, we must first put forth the effort deemed necessary by society. Some of us find positions at which we excel. Others buffet from job to job, finding varying degrees of satisfaction. Here at These Gentlemen, the question has been posed: What is your dream job? What is the station in life you feel is most fulfilling, most worthy of being chased after, that which continually drives you onward in dauntless pursuit? However, the Roundtable is not a place for idle musings. This is a forum of action and decisiveness. Thus in addition to explaining what their ideal position is, the Gentlemen will also go about detailing what it is they have done to make that dream a reality.

I would have put up this response about work earlier, but I spent the last week on vacation. Something in me said the atmosphere was not quite appropriate. As I have returned to my regular labors, so do does the Roundtable once again emerge from the shadowed rooms in which we gather and transcribe these thoughts. From that dark place, a ray of light emerges, one which I hope you enjoy. Without further ado, the Roundtable.


Max Nova

My dream job, unsurprisingly, would be professional music appreciator. John Peel is one of the few people to really have this job, although some days it seems like Chuck Klosterman and Bob Boilen get pretty close.

To attain this job I've already listened to a lot of music, a looooot of music.


John Ozkirbas

My goal is to become a State's Attorney for Baltimore City. Specifically, I want to handle sexual assault cases and help the court apply newer types of evidence and methods in finding evidence for these cases. It's a lot to handle, but I want to take it on.

As far as what I've done to achieve that goal? I graduated from UMD, majoring in Psychology and Criminal Justice, minoring in English, and participated in a sexual assault prevention education group called "SAFER" for two years. In addition to doing the traditional SAFER activities, I paid special attention to the legal application of rape and decided to make it my personal mission to increase accountability for people who commit this atrocious, tortuous crime. I decided that the best way I could do so was to step into the grind myself. So, I went to Law School.

So far, I've been doing fine. I've gotten through my first year and I'll be returning at full time, so, major milestone passed. Currently, I've been clerking for a small firm called "The Law Offices of David Ellin" at 20 South Charles Street, Baltimore. David Ellin used to work for the State's Attorney's office here in Baltimore and he takes me along to court whenever he has a case. He shows me the ropes a little bit and I get to see him in action, which is great. It's been an enriching experience, particularly for a first year law student. I suppose my next step is to return to school in the fall, do well, try out for moot court, and try to set up an internship in the State's Attorney's office the following summer. After that, we'll just have to see where things take me. I'll just try and steer it towards making the world a better place as much as I can.


Birmingham Graham

Dream job(s):

actor, costume designer (film), webdesigner, linguist.

I'm currently freelancing all of the first three (so if you've got a job for me...) and we'll see how I feel about that in another year. School is a maybe and a must at the same time, so I guess that's in the cards somewhere. If I wasn't an artist I would definitely be a linguist, with a focus on regional colloquialisms. I would be fluent in at least five languages. Maybe when I retire.

The thing about it is, in real life I find even 5 year plans

ridiculous, not to mention unrealistic and depressing, so at the moment I'm flying by the seat of my pants in my chosen profession, like the messy artist I can't help but be. I'd love to not be working in food service or retail for the rest of my life (or ever again, if I can help it) and after living on my own for a year my standards for "dream job" are quickly deteriorating. Now pretty much anything with health insurance would fit the bill. From where I stand, stories of "business trips," "power lunches," and "company picnics" sound so awesome and so magically unattainable, and all the while my 9-5 friends envy my freedom and choice/ability to pursue my art. I'm sure I'll agree if I ever get one. It's funny how the grass is always greener. Especially when it comes to dream jobs.


David Pratt

I would think this one is obvious for those who know me. My dream is to become the President of the United States of America. The first election year in which I will be old enough to run is 2020. As for working towards this goal, it's a difficult question. Sometimes I feel like it's all I think about, others I wonder what I've ever done to make anyone pay attention to what I'm saying. It all comes down to making people sit up and take notice. For that to happen, I know I have to be much more proactive about getting the word out there. More than anything, I want to prove that in this age, and in America, a man can rise to the top without a massive political machine and billions of dollars behind him. I want to prove that all it takes is communication, honesty, and a vision of enough strength to unite a country. In this new world of the internet, the instant message, twitter, facebook, and even, dare I say, the blog, I believe this is all possible.

A lot can happen in 11 years, and I'm confident that I'll have this on lockdown when the time comes.



Matt Lindeboom

Dream Job:

I want to be one of those writers from whose work a phrase or a paragraph is stripped and pasted on a website dedicated to inspirational quotes. For example:

On Existence: "The world is an hour glass, floating upside-down in a mercurial ocean of a tepid god's banal imagination; a fossil; a tool rusted and bent. Sigh."

On Love: "My advice is to fall in love often. This will make remarrying much easier."

On Popularity: "Make them laugh, give generously, set a solid moral example, and they'll never ask about those bodies in the basement."

So I want to be Normal Mailer. To further my plans I've begun to drink gin in the morning with my cereal.

Ali Daniels

When I was 5 years old, I decided one day that I would like to be a movie star, please. And that was that. Later I realized that I really like singing as well, so I broadened my goals to 'generic performance career' and I swing back and forth between wanting to be a singer more and wanting to act more, and between stage and film. So really, I have the most stereotypical dream job that America offers, but I'm okay with that. I just wish it didn't meant that there are simultaneously millions of other girls vying for the same thing.

What have I done to attain super-stardom? Not a whole lot, actually. I have a fancy piece of paper that says I received a degree (magna cum laude, no less. Ooooo.) in theatre, which doesn't prove much of anything to future employers. I write songs in my spare time, but I'm not entirely sure what I should do with them once they're written. In the coming year, though, I plan to audition my ass off and look into that little 'What next?' question. I'll let you know how it goes.

In the meantime, if you know anyone who needs a vocalist to sing a wedding or a funeral, my fee is very reasonable and I come highly recommended.

Daniel Strauss

My dream job is really in two parts, either writing, or acting for the camera. What am I doing to attain it? Yeesh. That's the hard part. Currently, I'm writing as much as I can (I'm currently working on a screenplay about my camp experiences) and performing improv all around Chicago, most notably with my iO (formerly Improv Olympic) Harold team at the iO Theater. We'll see what happens.



And thus we conclude another Roundtable. I hope all of our readers have taken a bit of inspiration from our own musings. Perhaps this will move others towards reaching for their long-held goals and ultimately obtaining those half-forgotten desires of yesterday. Remember, you get out of life what you put into it. However I am confident that we all have it within us to achieve that which we want in life, and to strive for it is the mark of - what else? - a gentleman.

We'll be back next time with more from our Gentlemen when the Roundtable punches in next.