I have decided to do three weeks of ‘boot camp’ followed by one week off. This past week has been my first week off and it has been a relative breeze. I only climbed the mountain four times this week.
Perhaps that left me with some more energy to set a self record. I decided to try to make it from my door to the park entrance in under ten minutes (0.85 miles). This part of the route in all on side streets. It’s all uphill and increasingly so from the gentle slope of the first two blocks to the low-gear, spirit-crushing San Francisco
When I ran at a good clip till the end from my apartment to the fourth block when I petered out into a brisk walk up ‘kill hill’. I missed my goal by a minute. Still, eleven minutes was over a minute better than my best time to the park gates.
Why not ply my advantage and keep pushing to the top, I thought. On my other runs, my exhaustion from just speed-walking up ‘kill hill’ had kept me from breaking back into a run until much further up the hill when the slope is less extreme and I had ample time to catch my breath. It just felt insane to start running at any point before that.
Now I had a reason.
I told myself that whenever I passed through a gate (there are several) or when the winding trail makes a significant left turn I would break into a run for as long as I could. I don’t know about anyone else, but for me there’s something character building about walking fast up a hill, sweaty and exhausted and then deciding, what the hell, let’s starting running! That’s where it all happens, where the proverbial rubber meets the fabled road: the point of decision.
I heard an Australian tri-athlete speak once. He spoke of his daily training regiment which just from hearing it made me feel like one of those plastic water cups crushed under the thousands of running feet on the course such an event. Then he said, “The hardest part of all that training is putting on my shorts.”
The point of decision.
That’s where we make or break ourselves. Those forks in the road make up a small percentage of our time but what we do at that moment effects us long after we decide how to act, which direction to go. It’s that moment in time when I opt to practice instead of throwing in a movie, to pass up luscious free food on a craft table—free for God sake, FREE!—to hook up my lap top to my music studio and work on my album instead of discovering—to my amazement—I have spent an hour or two on Facebook “just checking up”. It’s putting my bass in it’s case and heading out to that scary open mic instead of having a nice quiet evening with Audra.
In school my teachers saw my poor grades against the contrast of my sharp mind. They would always say the same thing: “HOW CAN YOU HAVE YOUR PUDDING IF… no, no, actually they said “If only you would apply yourself…”. I didn’t know what that meant. Apply myself? Do they think I’m simply not trying?
When I ‘applied myself’, ‘dug deep’, ‘put my nose to the grindstone’, ‘toughed it up’, ‘shouldered through it’ that worked for a day or two at that age, about a month or two these days.
Then I get tired, I get bored, I see something shiny and before long I’m back to my old ways. Then I feel like a failure which causes me to avoid a return to the any good habits I had started to work on for long periods of time. This in turn makes me feel badly which perpetuates the cycle of inactivity and strengthens my denial of where this passive path has taken me and continues to lead me: broke, unhealthy and without a real music career.
Into adulthood I have very slowly inched towards a better understanding how I work and how I don’t work. I have slowly learned to feel good about who I am, including my challenges with learning, general awkwardness and even difficulty some very basic life skills.
In the past I have tried to make a permanent change like turning a sharp corner and never looking back. If you can make a change like that without screeching your tires you probably weren’t going anywhere in the first place.
Knowing me as I do, this week off concept is crucial. By taking a break I get to relax without feeling bad about it. I told myself that for this week, I didn’t have to do anything I didn’t want to. I could eat anything I wanted and that I could indulge in the things I had restricted myself from for those three weeks. If I get it done, great, if not, screw it; it’s my week off!
The interesting thing is that I did go crazy. I wasn’t like Alfred Molina in the movie “Chocolat”; going bat shit crazy with self denial and pigging out on an entire chocolate shop. I continued to run, just not every day, I continued to engage in many of the good habits I had established during the first leg of boot camp. I merely cut myself some slack and refused to feel badly about it. My food indulgences were few because now I had an intimate correlation between what I eat and the work I had to do (climbing the mountain) to take it off. I didn’t want to put myself too far behind what I had already.
Speaking of which, I weighed in at the same weight as last week yet my waist is down a whole inch this week. I can see the difference in the mirror too so I don’t think the tape measure is stretching. I can only guess that I’m building muscle. I know that if I continue to do what I’m doing that the scale will follow.
Tomorrow, when the second leg of boot camp begins, I’ll be ready to get back to work. I’m refreshed, relaxed, rested; I’ve had some chocolate, a donut and a few other treats.
I’m good to go! Now where are my shorts?
