In Your Face
Sometimes I can be, well, stubborn. Once upon a time I won a bar bet involving 10 pound dumbbells. Why there were ten pound dumbbells in the bar and who brought them I’m still a bit unclear on. I think we were making fun of the guy who had them, which is what led to the bet.
Simply stated, it was an endurance thing: Hold your arm straight out with the elbow locked, dumbbell in your fist, and see who can stand it the longest. After a minute, it started to hurt. One of the guys dropped out. Two minutes, and another dropout, leaving two of us. Three minutes and my arm was starting to burn. Four minutes and I wanted to give up. But I wasn’t going to give. The stubborn thing had kicked in. The other guy gave at 5 minutes. I held it beyond him for a slow, painful and utterly pointless count of 20. An “in your face,” I guess. The sad thing is, I think the prize for winning was not having to buy the next round. Oh yeah, a prize up there with winning the lottery, oh yeah.
This all came back up this week. Our gym announced “Hell Week”, a contest involving taking the most classes over the period of a week. Cycling courses, running courses, abs workouts, kickboxing, yoga, pilates and more fun of that variety. Something in my brain twisted. I was gonna do it. Not only that, I was gonna win. I worked out the maximum number of courses I could take, planned a strategy and steeled myself for the ordeal.
Okay, day 1 started badly. A 6 a.m. cycling class, the first class of the contest, went on without me. I couldn’t sleep the night before, and when the time rolled around, I really needed to stay in bed. That’s okay, I made the noon cycling and was still off to a strong start. Pilates that evening was great, as was an X-Factor class (lots of running in odd ways) and an abs class (15 minutes of actual hell).
Friday started at 6:30, cycling again. I hurried home, walked the dog, and went back for Hatha Flow Yoga. Here’s where things started to go South. We started by sitting cross-legged, our eyes closed, and had a… reading. An odd reading about finding your guru and some story about a woman who’s kid got locked in a hotel room. She decided to lie on the floor and touch his fingers through the gap beneath the door rather than doing the sensible thing and getting the hotel staff to just open the damn door. The moral was pretty muddy, and ended with the line “it’s not enough, and yet it is”. The kind of nonsensical hippy crap that I can’t bear, especially after living among hippies during and after college. I wanted to scream “It is or it isn’t: that kind of statement is just spiritual and intellectual laziness!”. I held my tongue.
I should have held my breath. As we started the actual workout, someone in the room began emitting a strong, sulfurous stream of gasses. And I found it hard to hold plank, as an elbow injury earlier in the year still isn’t completely healed. As the instructor started quickly calling out yoga terms without acknowledging any beginners who didn’t know what she was talking about, and as another jet of flatulence became apparent, I fled the room. I’ve got nothing against Yoga, but this teacher had obviously eaten too much granola.
Still, I managed three classes that day. Today, I intended to do three as well. I’ve done zero. Tomorrow, I’ll probably do one, maybe two, or maybe even zero.
The stubborness has slipped. A serious session of self-examination took its place. Why was I doing this? Very few people seemed to be competing, so I felt I had a strong chance if I kept up the pace. But I was a bit sore, and I realized that this contest would require most of my time for several days to come. I honestly wanted to go to the farmer’s market with Maggie and Storm (the lovely and perfect Golden Retriever) instead of pushing my body to its limits. I wanted to stop obsessing about schedules and endurance. So I let go.
Why had I wanted to do this?
Partly, I think, because I was never athletic as a kid and was always teased about my lack of ability in gym class. Now that I’m older, I’m more active than most of my peers. Was it time for another “in your face”, perhaps?
Partly because I’m feeling really down about myself. I’ve had trouble looking in the mirror lately: My idea of what I look like and the face in the mirror are too different. A recent “Good Lord, I’m ugly” episode left me shaken by its intensity. Maybe I could get that muscular stomach to make up for my face?
And partly (and maybe mostly) because I felt the need to be part of something. Something to pull me from the sense of isolation that’s been growing for a while now. Fitting in has never been something that’s come easily to me. Too geeky for the average person, to “normal” for the geeks. Shy about calling people up to do things. That sort of thing. Going to all the classes, proving myself the strongest, seeing the other contestants regularly… it seemed like a connection.
But I knew it wasn’t, not really. After the contest was over, there would be no real continuity to the achievement. This morning, it all started to feel empty. I’m glad that I’ve achieved what I have, but continuing at my initial level of intensity no longer makes sense, at least not to me.
I’m still going to some classes, I’m still going to attend the party at the end of the week and see if I get a small consolation prize. But there’s not going to be a stubborn “in your face.” I’ll settle for a drink and an evening of socializing in the company of my wife. Maybe it’s not enough, but it is enough… oh forget it, even after all this, I can’t swallow that. Instead, I’ll let you know how it all ends.