I’ve been on a journey for most of my life. It’s been a long, strange trip as they say. It’s been my search to find fitness. And by fitness, I mean it in the most legitimate sense of the word. Not just having abs, or being able to bench press my body weight or completing a triathlon. No, somewhere I got the idea that true, legitimate fitness was something more than any of those things. Where did that idea come from? I do not know. Somewhere deep within my being, the quest to find this yet undefined level of fitness stems. It is simply a part of my being – the fabric if you will, from which I am made.
So many others have also been on the same trek – a search for fitness. Mine has been a relentless seeking. I’ve grown weary of course and at times quit the journey for brief periods, but that was in the early days when I was still struggling a bit to establish the way to consistently impose upon myself the discipline to work out. About the age of 17, I determined that I must wake up early and begin the day by working out at 5:30am. I can remember hearing the alarm clock come on and struggling to convince myself to get out of bed. It was dark and extremely cold in the dead of winter in western NY where I grew up. It was a hard reality to face when you are not even sure if what you are doing is productive. But I would arise from bed and put on 2 or 3 sweatshirts at times to face the sometimes 20-degree temperatures as I would run, jump rope and perform calisthenics in the dimly lit garage. I would embark on workouts that would run the gamut from banal to asinine.
Finding the Right Fitness Program
As I think back, much of the time I was falling off the fitness path, it was due to one of two things. I was either overwhelmed with over-regimentation that was either too difficult to be sustainable and/or not sure that what I was doing would yield results at all. For all the getting up early and going on the “hard routine” I needed to see that it would be worth it. I came to realize the question that all who embark on their own fitness journey are faced with: how does one learn all the tacit knowledge there is to know about getting in shape? The best answer I could find was the vague and ubiquitous “you just have to find what works for you”. In the end – frustrated with the ocean of information by countless “experts” about diet and exercise – I would often question, how much did I really care? It’s like the promise of a great-paying job. The payoff is alluring, but then you realize the life you’ll be living in order to get the payoff. It all will boil down to a lucid moment when you realize your limits and your humanity. You end up resigning yourself to the fact that you just are not the kind of person to be able to do such things as get a degree, write a book, play an instrument, build a business or get in shape and stay that way.
To be fair, my journey to achieve fitness has not been entirely elusive but it has been full of starts and stops. I’ve fallen off the path due to fatigue, drudgery and injury. There has also been plenty of side excursions into sometimes only crudely charted fitness territories. These side roads were countless rabbit trails of “the harder the better” routines, questionable science-based programs and often the allure that novelty or complexity must necessarily yield better results. It was continuous trial and error. In retrospect, I look back and cringe a bit at the things I tried while thinking I was making progress. In reality, I was nowhere near finding my way out of the woods. That would take many more years. But we will have to continue this story in Part 2.