Stronger than my excuses | Blog Post Discussion | Forum

“Those who think they have no time for exercise will sooner or later have to find time for illness.”

– Edward Stanley

Fitness has always been an important part of my life.

I was an active child — the woods were my playground and I’d get lost for hours exploring the nooks and crannies of my rural surroundings. I loved to read, too — and could easily get lost in books for days (and later, video games), but my mom was always telling making me go outside and play. And I am sincerely grateful for that.

I wasn’t into the “popular” sports in high school — so I didn’t play football, basketball, or baseball — but I did run x-country and play tennis — and like most things, I was just average at both of them. I would’ve loved to play soccer, but I went to a very small school, with a small budget, and we didn’t have a soccer program until the year I graduated.

My active youth led to an active adulthood. I didn’t play any sports in college, but I did play lots of video games. Fortunately, I also started working out at the college gym — but to be honest, this probably had more to do with it being a way for me and my roommate to meet see girls. Still, it did manage to provide me with a solid introduction to strength training — as well as girl watching.

Outside of watching feminine beauties breath heavy sweat work out, I also enjoyed running, hiking, biking, rollerblading, shooting hoops, volleyball, skiing, and whatever else I could do with friends.

While I have always been somewhat active, I’ve only put varying degrees of effort into consistently working out and being “fit” over the years. Though, the older I’ve gotten, I’ve consistently worked out for far longer periods of time (years) and restarted far less frequently than I used to.

But ignoring what went on before this time, I’m starting this story in January 2009. This is the month I decided to change the intensity and frequency of my gym workouts in order to meet a new goal — I wanted to “get into the best shape of my life”.

While this may sound like a fuzzy goal, I had a specific idea of what that would look like and how that would feel. I knew what I wanted and I committed myself to going after it. For once, I wanted to get better than average results.

As a result of my new commitment, I separated my cardio & strength training routines into two sessions and started working out twice a day.

I’d get up before dawn each day and train for an hour before heading to work. This had the side effect of consistently making me one of the 1st three people at work every weekday. And after work I’d head back to the gym for my second session.

I’d made my new fitness goal before I figured out where I’d find the time to make it happen. In fact, if you’d asked me if I had the time to work out for 2 hours a day, I would’ve said,  ”No. There’s no way.”

But I was nothing if not commited to my goal and as a result, I somehow made the time. After a while, my two routines felt so separated by time and activities that it didn’t really feel any different or any more extreme than it had when I was working out only once a day.

Somehow, despite “losing” more than an extra hour to exercise each day, everything I needed to do in my waking hours still got done.

As a result of my commitment, I found myself delving more and more into nutrition. I read up on what to eat and what not to eat — and how to eat. I began to religiously read food labels and I learned to avoid processed foods. I made a lot of my meals from scratch at night that I would bring to work in resealable plastic containers the next day. It turns out that some of the simplest meals to make are also the most nutritious — and delicious.

I completely changed my diet — what I ate, how I ate, and when I ate. Rather than 3 standard meals per day, I ate 6 smaller balanced meals a day at roughly 2 hour intervals.

It felt weird getting up from my desk at work every two hours to get food from the fridge, but then I figured it wasn’t any weirder than the cigarette breaks I would see people take — and what I was doing was actually good for me.

I also quit soda, juice, and coffee and replaced them with water and tea — lots of water and tea.

And I kept track of everything. Time spent training. Distance traveled. Calories burned. Weight lifted. There was even a 6 month period where I weighed my food on a digital scale for caloric intake which I would compare to my calorie expenditure each day.

It was a lot of work, but I loved it. And I never felt more fit — or healthier — than I did then. I slept better and required less sleep. I had energy all day and no longer got tired in the afternoons — and I never had to rely on caffeine or potentially dangerous energy drinks to stay alert.

And my time at the gym — those two hours every day – was my favorite time of day. Even after getting up before dawn, working out, and spending a long day at work, I looked forward to my second workout.

Now, I know that for most people, two hours a day sounds like an insane amount of time to spend at the gym — and yet, people don’t think much of sitting on a couch or in a chair for 4 or more hours each night watching TV, playing video games, or surfing the web — or possibly doing all 3 things at the same time. It’s really not that much time to spend on something that’s actually good for you.

I wasn’t doing what I was doing to “get big” — that look never really appealed to me. And I wasn’t competing with or doing this for anyone but myself. I just wanted to look and feel fit — for me.

And that time in the gym — it was my “me time” — meditative & therapeutic — and an escape from my work life. And I loved how it made me feel both mentally and physically. It changed my posture and how I carried myself. I fit better in my clothes and I felt more confident when I moved and when I spoke.

It also made my one (?) compulsion — carrying all my groceries, no matter how many bags I had, into my apartment in a single go — a lot easier.

And I loved how I could direct my workouts by setting personal goals and then set about achieving them. I learned that I could simply decide what I wanted to focus on and then train my body to get the results I desired. I learned that my body was a machine. If I treated it well, used it wisely, and put good things into it, it would treat me well in return and I would get good things out of it.

I pushed my body until it burned — nearly every single day for almost two years — and it felt amazing. I never regretted a second of it.

And then on May 8, 2010 — after nearly two years of intense training — I stopped all that — completely.

That wasn’t exactly what I had planned.

I thought that I’d keep training — and I really thought I had the self-discipline to do it. I’d even planned on running my first marathon by the end of 2010 (and then on Dec 31st I deferred it to 2011).

I figured that even though I was starting “a new and chaotic life”, I’d just scale back my strength training and just keep running — and I could run anywhere, whether I had access to a gym or not. And I had not one, but two bikes with me, which I planned on using (that didn’t go quite as planned).

[ Because I like running fast (and not so much the distance thing) -- in the months leading up to my trip I set a goal to run a 5k in under 20 minutes as a way to keep me motivated on the treadmill. I know you don't run a marathon fast, but hey, part of staying motivated about working out is keeping it fun -- so I'd alternate between long distance (10k+) and short distance (5k) runs.

And on the 5th of April 2010 I accomplished my goal by running 5k in 19 minutes and 46 seconds.

It seemed like such a crazy goal when I set it -- and yet I'd done it. If you're a runner, that may not seem like much to you, but in my own personal goal setting department, it's still a big deal. It felt like a real accomplishment and it taught me things about setting goals and working towards them.

Part of the reason it's a big deal is because I really had to work for it.

In the beginning I had a lot of unexpected knee & back pain to contend with. I'd never had serious knee or back issues before -- just minor stuff that would go away -- but the pain made the challenge of my goal even harder.

I've heard many people say they don't run because of knee or back pain, but I didn't want to be one of those people. I believed that if I was patient and tried different things, I could work through it -- and that the pain would pass.

And it did -- but it was a lot of work and a delicate balance of pushing my body and then switching my techniques, giving myself time to heal -- and then pushing forward again.

It took about 2 months for the pain to go away completely, but eventually whatever muscles needed to grow in order to provide the support I needed to overcome my pain, grew -- my body adapted and the pain went away. Now when people tell me they don't run because of knee or back pain, I have ask them how many different things they tried to overcome the problem. ]

And then on May 8, 2010, my training came to an end — my entire lifestyle changed.

At first, my body responded by simply losing weight — but at about 10-11% body fat, it wasn’t fat that I lost — it was muscle (and water). In the first two weeks of my adventure I lost 14 lbs. I wasn’t eating enough food to compensate for my metabolism and my body mass, so my body started eating itself for protein.

Those first few weeks presented me with challenges I’d never experienced before. I felt weak and overwhelmed by this new world that I’d stepped into. Some may remember my “The end is the beginning.” post from day 61 where I talked about reconsidering everything.

So I decided to “give myself a break”. I told myself that it would be impossible to keep up my training. I told myself that because I didn’t have a refrigerator to keep things in or a stove to cook things on, I wouldn’t be able to eat the kinds of foods necessary to stay in shape anyway. I told myself that what I was trying to accomplish was more important than what I hoped would be a temporary lapse in my diet & fitness. And these sounded like perfectly reasonable excuses to me at the time.

To fight my dramatic weight loss, I began force feeding myself high-carb Clif Bars — and that helped. And after I lost much of the muscle that kept my body burning so many calories — even when I wasn’t working out — my metabolism slowed dramatically. This had the added benefit of not requiring me to eat so much — but my inhibited metabolism and lack of regular exercise meant that if I wasn’t careful, I’d eventually start gaining weight — and I did.

Over the next 8 months between June 2010 and January 2011, despite a constant watch on what I ate, I gained all my weight back, but on a much less muscular frame — which is to say, I got a bit flabby. I didn’t like it, but I was living with it — and my excuses still seemed valid. I figured this was all just a part of the adventure I was on and a “necessary” and unavoidable change.

It wasn’t until February 2011 that I finally decided to do something about it. Not only was I not feeling good physically, I wasn’t feeling good mentally either — and knowing what I know about how physical exercise can affect mood, I realized there was a connection. I’d known this for a while, but my excuses were still stronger than my desire to overcome them.

But then that changed. I realized once again that I only have one body — and that it has to last a lifetime. And I decided that my health — my whole health — physical and mental, was something I should once again make a priority in my life, regardless of whatever I excuses I made to the contrary.

It seemed ridiculous that I would actively avoid doing something that I knew would be good for me — not only for the immediate benefits, but for the long-term ones, too. Even so, it took some effort to change my mindset from “I just don’t think I can work out while on my adventure” to “I will find a way to workout on my adventure“, but I did it.

That’s often how I work. I may take a long while to consider something, but once I make a decision, I commit to it fully. And in this case, I decided once again that getting up at dawn and working out for an hour was what I needed to do.

To shed fat, I focused on cardio — an hour per day for two months straight — and that helped. I got results.

It also helped that I started once again paying much closer attention to what and how and when I ate. And as a result of all this, I felt better — and I started to look better, too.

On April 1, 2011, I was a guest on the morning show Sacramento & Co. After watching the video, someone following me remarked that I looked skinny and probably needed to gain a little weight. I considered that a sign that I’d been successful and I could probably afford to work out a little less intensely.

As spring turned to summer, I started traveling with more regularity — and that made it more difficult (at least in my mind) to maintain my daily cardio workout. To compensate, I dropped my 60 minute routine down to 30 and kept up with that as best I could until November. And I felt “ok” about that, but I also felt like I was doing the bare minimum to “get by”.

In early November, I was at a 24 Hour Fitness in Miami, Florida when I decided it was time to honestly re-assess my fitness. I looked in the mirror and saw a “skinny fat person”. I wasn’t exactly overweight, but my body composition was just a mess and I didn’t really have any muscle tone.

I thought about adding strength training to my routine, but for some reason it seemed like a huge commitment. I felt like I had so far to go — and once again, I didn’t know where I’d find the time.

So instead of strength training, I increased my cardio from 30 minutes to 60 minutes. It was the easiest thing I could do. I told myself it would help me get used to spending that time at the gym each day. And it was tough at first, but Netflix, man — Netflix can be such a great training tool when you’re doing cardio (I watch TV shows on my phone). Who knew?

Despite the intention of starting a strength training routine by January, it wasn’t until February 2nd that I finally made the leap.

And it started like this:

I did 10 sit-ups four times.

That’s it.

40 sit-ups total. That was my strength training routine on day 1. And that’s all I could do. It was awful. For contrast, I used to do 150 in a row on a decline bench — and crunches — and ab planking. Yes, I was kind of into it back then.

Following my 40 sit-ups, my entire abs region was sore for about 5 days. But I knew from experience I’d be feeling it — and I knew from experience that the soreness would eventually pass.

And then on February 5th I added to my strength training routine by doing push-ups. I did 47. In sets of 10. I aimed for 50, but 47 was all I could do. I used to do 50 in a row.

Following my 47 push-ups, my chest and shoulders burned for about 5 days. And again, that pain eventually passed.

Since February 5th, in addition to doing my cardio workout as usual, I have been steadily adding to my strength training routine — increasing my repetitions and adding new exercises.

In the past two weeks I have gone from only doing 1 exercise — to 2 — to about 7 per workout (for an hour total). And this morning I did 100 sit-ups in sets of 25. And I have switched from push-ups to the bench press because it’s easier to keep track of weight — which has seen a steady increase.

And still, every time I workout, it feels like a struggle… but:

“The reason people give up so fast is because they tend to look at how far they still have to go instead of how far they have gotten.”

So I’m focusing on my accomplishments rather than the hill I see in front of me — and I think this is a good lesson for more than just exercise.

I still feel weak every time I work out — and I have so far to go to get to where I want to be — but at the same time, every time I workout I feel progress — and soon I will see progress. I also draw reassurance from the fact I am no longer sore like I was after my initial abs or chest exercises — despite doing more exercises.

My body is waking up — and thanking me — and I know that every day I work out is one day closer to my goal.

If there is one thing I would like to get across in writing all this, it is that fitness is important. We all know this, and yet many of us find excuses not to exercise — like I did.

And even though many of us make a concerted effort to get fit — many people start a routine and may even get over the hump of the initial pain and discomfort — which is always the worst part (save for injury) — and then often something happens and they find an excuse to stop.

And time passes — or guilt builds — and they decide they really should (and want to) follow through on their goal, so they pick it up again.

And because they took time off, they now have to deal with the discomfort of starting over again — and it sucks.

They may even make it longer this time before something happens and they stop…

And the cycle repeats. Start over. Start to see/feel results. Stop.

And many, many people spend so many times starting over and dealing with the discomfort that comes with that, that they associate getting fit with how awful it feels when they start their fitness routine.

And as a result, many people mistakenly think that they hate working out — when what they really hate is starting over. Once they get over the hump, they actually like workout out, the changes they see, and how they feel.

There is a rather easy fix to avoid the feeling of starting over — and that is to stop quitting. If one disciplines and commits one’s self to not stopping, they’ll never have to feel the discomfort, like I do right now, of having to start over.

But — I’ve decided something recently — I’m not just starting over my strength training…

I’ve decided once again that I want to “get in the best shape of my life”. And I’ve decided once again that I want to run a 5k in under 20 minutes.

I have so far to go, but I’m looking forward to the journey. And I don’t plan on starting this one more than once.

While I am now a couple years older than I was the last time I went about this process, I refuse to let my age dictate what I am capable of. Few people rarely push themselves as far as they are physically capable of — the voice in their head tells them when to stop before their body does.

And while I’ve gotten older — and I can’t change that — I think of it as getting better, not getting older anyway.

Now, the complex chaos of my life hasn’t really changed all that much since I left on my journey 649 days ago. Everything that I had to deal with in the first few weeks of my adventure — everything that made me feel overwhelmed and incapable of doing any more than I was doing still exists.

What has changed is how I think about it. I know that, as much as I don’t like to admit it, I was using the chaos of my current life as an excuse — even if it sounded like a perfectly reasonable one to myself and others — it was still an excuse.

As they say, “If it’s important to you, you’ll find a way. If it isn’t, you’ll find an excuse.” And I’m tired of making excuses — not just with regard to exercise, but with regard to everything.

So as I go about making myself stronger once again — I am making the time to workout and eat properly.

I am becoming stronger than my excuses.

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Follow-up:

“Best & most unexpected result of me posting today’s blog entry: Girls sending me bikini pics. That happens? Apparently yes. I must now figure out how to maximize the frequency of this occurrence.” — (Facebook)