FITNESS WORK STARTS WITH . . .

Fitness work starts with a glancing look in a mirror, a reflection in a window.

Or your wife asking, “What happened?”

However, if you’re not married, no problem.

There are still plenty of body shaming opinions shared quietly.

Just not with you.

Think of fitness work as an attitude, a ‘can-do’ attitude, a ‘let’s go’ attitude.

This is where over-thinkers drop the ball instead of lifting the weight.

“Can-do what? Let’s go where?”

A weak platitude is not condusive to a better attitude.

Instead of some dumb saying for fitness motivation, it’s everything you’ve ever heard and ignored about fitness work.

Get your mind right.

 

Let’s Go Boomer

Baby boomers have been around longer than the Universal Gym.

Longer than Cross Fit, Boot Camp, and most other prods to get yourself moving.

So we ought to be well conditioned? For what?

Aging out means you’ve missed your opportunity.

Here’s the secret: you never age out of fitness work.

Another secret?

You don’t age out of feeling like shit if you remember how you felt when you were in the best shape of your life.

 

Before marriage and kids I used the gym at Portland State.

Since I worked on the Park Blocks it was a short walk between the trees.

Lot’s of football players and wrestlers were in the room.

It was a good group to be inspired by.

There were also older guys practicing their strut from lift to lift.

The one guy who caught my attention was a soft looking, long-haired, lifter.

In one of those gym glitches I often found myself there when he was.

What I learned: He was a powerlifter who stuck to the Olympic lifts.

He was the strongest guy in the gym. Not the best dressed, not the sweatiest, and not the best hairdo.

Strength was his goal, strength and power.

 

Strength Is A Good Goal

Tell me if this has ever happened to you:

I had my bench set up with all the weights I’d need for the lift.

One of the guys kept walking past and removing the plates on my rack.

He was a big headed geek with knees that bent slightly backwards like he’d been a bird in a previous life.

 

Me: What’s up with the weights.

Geek: You won’t need them.

Me: I brought them over here to use them.

Geek: I don’t know why because you’ll never be as strong as you used to be.

 

This was during my ‘comeback’ time.

I left the gym the day before I started chemo for neck cancer.

I’d put on two plates and pumped it out for eight reps.

Would I ever be that strong?

Well, wanted to find out. I’m still finding out.

When I find out that I’d peaked back then, I still wanted to set a post-chemo PR.

Did it matter when some geeky little fuck decides for me?

He didn’t. But he was probably right.

I still got a kick out of some pudgy stray guy taking over my bench.

He probably wanted to be friends? Gym friends.

 

The Point Of Fitness Work

If you want to do more, you need to be up for it.

You can’t do more if it’s too physically hard, to mentally demanding, and you have ‘other things’ more important.

Fitness starts in your head. You need to will yourself to move the mountain that is your body.

And it gets harder all the time.

One way to get it going:

Map a walk from your door and back and don’t stop to smell the flowers or pet a dog or chit-chat.

I get criticism for acting like every walk is a ‘death march.’

My head is down, my steps measured, and I kick it in whenever I go uphill.

If my dog is with me, this is where she goes wild and jumps around.

After I get my sheen on I lift in my garage.

I inherited an industrial squat rack/bench from my kids after they started lives with their own modern wall mounted racks.

I’m very proud to think they see the value in fitness work.

After I got married my wife decided I spent too much time in the PSU gym, so we bought a single-stack lifting station for our apartment.

I ended up moving it from NW Portland, to SE, to Tigard, then one more move.

You need to be strong to move that.

After I joined 24Hr, I gave it away and delivered it to the new owner.

A few months later he wanted to give it back because his kids didn’t use it.

I said give it time and if they still don’t get with it, donate it to his church.

 

Eternal Vigilance For Fitness

I can walk down the junk food aisle, the cookie aisle, even the beer aisle.

There’s nothing there that grabs me.

But the Safeway deli gets me almost every time.

Then you’ll find me chomping down a taquito, or a popper, or fried burrito, while I wait to check out.

Is it a good dietary choice? Better than an impulse buy of M&M’s in the big package.

The only thing that would make it better, or worse, would be a little tub of ranch dressing.

Mmm, mmm.

 

Here in Oregon we have a Death With Dignity Act.

The cost came in around $3500 for a lethal dose of Seconal.

It got me wondering about a Life With Dignity Act.

So I googled ‘death with dignity’ then replaced death with life and the same search came up.

Except it’s not the same search.

If you keep looking for life with dignity you’ll eventually land on fitness work.

Stay as fit as you can for as long as you can and you will feel the dignity.

It’ll be in your step, in your speech, and in your example.

Do it right and you might even achieve the nirvana of examples:

A Good Example, a fine specimen, an all-round role model.

That’s a lot to carry around so you need to be strong and fit.

Leave the no diggity for others.