In 2010 my life was upended by an unexpected and brutal divorce. Pain, darkness, despair, grief, utter.. Devastation.

Somehow, most often barely conscious at worst, or sleepwalking at best, through it all, I got up every day and worked out. I went to the pool, or Cardio Barre, or got on my spin bike, or went for a run. I managed to complete 5 triathlons. My physical activity, and my friends and family were simply, everything. The only thing that kept me from coming undone.

During the summer, in the deep tunnel, my friend Chris Zeitzman reached out, having heard news of my split. Having been divorced herself, she called to offer support. After not seeing her for quite some time, we reconnected.

I was stunned;
She was lean, ripped, content, focused, radiant.

Having raced in several triathlons with Chris, we both considered ourselves fairly accomplished athletes. She explained to me over that tear-filled dinner (of which I remember puzzling over her eating steamed spinach and grilled chicken while I dogged a whole plate of Mahi tacos and a chocolate sundae) that endurance athletes can easily carry around 20 extra pounds. Just because we work out regularly and race doesn’t mean we are at our athletic or physical best.

She told me about the program she did, and was now teaching called Peak 10 that incorporated metabolic circuits, strength training, pliometrics and a nutritional overhaul. She explained how it changed her body, her life, her self perception, her confidence, and her athletic performance. Not to mention at 42 she weighed what she weighed in college, lost 2 clothing sizes and has never felt more alive (and hot- my editorial).

I filed it away as I proceeded to stumble through the dark night (s) as summer turned to fall. The coming months were a blur of misery. My divorce drew to a close on a poetically apt New Years Eve.

The year turned, and I turned 40, and I began to slowly shift;  from survival, to a place of stillness. A place only from which new life can reveal. A tilled but fallow field.

And as the season turned to spring, so too did I.

I remembered Chris, and happened to reach out to her just as a new cycle of Peak 10 was beginning. She reconnected me with Michelle, who graciously made space for me in the already full program. A new phase presented itself.

The first workouts were humbling, mind numbing, shockingly hard. I considered myself a fit chick (having done over 30 triathlons, I mean I should be able to hang Peak right? HA!). I was shredded and destroyed. My life was an Epsom salt bath and a foam roller.

The program is set up with team spirit and camaraderie, which is needed. It was outrageously difficult, and the (commiseration) and encouragement of my fellow newbies along with the Peak staff helped assuage the dismay. Shock and awe. But we were in it together.

Early on, the nutritional changes were difficult to streamline- getting the correct amount of calories to create the deficits needed for weight loss but enough to fuel the grueling workouts. Cutting out dry carbs and refined sugar, learning what to eat and when. Again, humbling considering I thought myself to be nutritionally savvy, a life long vegetarian and endurance athlete. Think again.

But here is one of the many synergistic and wonderful things about how embarking on the Peak journey coincided with my life change-
I was a blank slate. The divorce stripped all of the criteria I used to define and tether myself. I was raw, “skinned” as I named it, and thus coachable, curious, malleable, yielding. That’s what happens when the bottom drops out and we fall- we can break, or we can break open.

I asked questions. I availed myself of the support of Michelle, Kanda, Chris, Yalda. These women are experts in their field, utterly inspirational, and available. They are a precious resource. And I used them. I made adjustments. I took feedback. I allowed myself to be humbled. And slowly I began to see results.

At the close of cycle 1 at the end of June I was down 13 pounds, inches all over and a clothing size. I felt amazing but decided to keep going.

I wore the dotfit Experspy all summer, continued to eat clean and make deficits. I had fun with my workouts, doing ATC, new classes and swim training. I continued to train and in late summer I did a week long swim expedition in the Greek Islands, completing my first 20k swim. I came back lean, tan, relaxed, and feeling... HOT!

As the fall Peak 10 program opened, I was down 18 pounds from when I started on May 1. I decided to do a second round of Peak because I loved how Michelle described phase 2- phase 1 you loose the weight, phase 2 is when the cuts come in. Cuts? Bring it!

Close of Phase 2- down 21 pounds, 3 clothing sizes (from a 10 to a 4), $1000 in tailoring and alterations, a new wardrobe including hot new underthings, a 6 pack of abs, lean arms, a firm butt, and lost inches all over.

Now, I tell this story because there is another piece of it which I hope will inspire others to commit, no matter what.
And that is my lifestyle.

I travel for work. A lot. Internationally. It could have been an easy excuse to derail my progress, or not even attempt this at all. While it was frustrating to never quite be able to settle into a routine, I decided to give it my full attention and commitment. I was as resourceful and creative as I could be with creating continuity. And it worked. There is a huge sense of accomplishment in this for me.

In 2011 I went to:
DC 3 times (March, June, Oct)
Phoenix (May)
Austin (March)
El Paso (Feb)
Hawaii 3 times (Feb, May, Nov)
San Fran 2 times (April, Dec)
Vegas 2 times (Sept, Oct)
Denver (Nov)
Poland and Lithuania (July)
Greece (Sept)
Denmark (Oct)
France (Dec)

That is 18 trips out of state or country this year. And that is a less than average travel year.

I still managed to get results. I used the DVD’s and hotel gyms. If there were no gyms I worked out in my room. I watched what I ate on the road (which is hard, esp overseas, but it can be done). I checked my burns with the experspy. Even if I couldn’t log food I began to develop a sense of what I can eat based on what I burn every day (even when travelling and eating odd things at odd times). What I learned is that with focus and clear intention, it can be done.

One final point- my triathlons.
I competed in 5 Olympic Distance triathlons this year.
Two before Peak and 3 during.
Of the three during, two were races I had done before so I have a basis of comparison.
And to be fully transparent, I wasn’t training for triathlon since I started Peak. I have not been biking or running on the road. I did these races more to mix it up and to quantify my progress. The results were way beyond my expectations.

Stats:
Santa Barbara Tri Long Course (August, which was 18 pounds and 4 months into Peak):
3 minutes off my swim
10 minutes off my bike
12 minutes off my run
Up 25 minutes from 2010’s time.

Big Rock Olympic Distance (RUN PR!!!)
8 minutes off my bike
5 minutes off my run
10k PR
Up 5 minutes from 2010’s time.

More results with less training. Less pounds of me to haul around. Improved power, better endurance, stronger over all, and most importantly, I look better in spandex so I am more confident!
I love my sport more than ever. I am off the plateau, and know I can improve even as I have aged up, with less hours hammering on the road and in the pool.

Everything has changed for me. I still grieve. I miss my ex husband. I experience moments of deep loneliness and sorrow. I am fully solo, single and taking this time to explore my interior world. I am witnessing and working in the muck and the depths. Buried “stuff” that can only come to the surface in solitude. I live alone, and I travel alone.

But there is a spring in my step, a lightness in my heart that has so much to do with the visceral, cellular, corporeal transition I have witnessed in myself, of myself.

If my outside can shift in this manner, and the protective layer I carried on the exterior can shed, so too can my heart. And in that I trust. And I have proof in this puddin.
I am grateful, and awed, and humbled.

Thank you Michelle.

Progress does not come like a trend line moving gradually upward. It happens like a toddler climbing stairs. Lots of grunts and strains, face turning red, but no upward movement, not even much hope. Then there’s the reaching with the arms and the knee coming up, the other leg pushing, and then wow  --  it seems like it happens all at once. But that’s the illusion that comes with the sudden rush. It never happens all at once. Someone once said, “Honor the failure, there’s more of it, and it’s the leading ingredient in success.”

That can’t be true, I thought. If you read the small print on a bag of victory, the first ingredient is failure?

I do know that if you draw “progress,” as a trend line, you get a squiggly line from left to right that looks like time elapsing with no results to show for it, and then the “jump-up.” On the graph it looks like a stair.

It happened for me after the three-week mark of the Peak Fit class, a few days before the halfway point. All of a sudden, my pants were fitting differently. My belt easily slid in a notch. I went back to the drawer I never open and dug to the bottom for some pants I hadn’t worn in years. They fit. My thighs were thinner.

Of course I was shocked, but why? There is something childish about plugging an address into your GPS and then being elated when you arrive there. It’s science. We live in the physical world. What did you expect? You set a goal, you put a verifiable system for achieving it in place, and then you run the plan. But you’re surprised when it works?

Then why does mastery over some things seem mystical? 

The places in my day where I catch myself eating when I should not be eating, and what I should not be eating, such as cheese and crackers 40 minutes before I go to bed, are like leaks in the bottom of a boat. Part of the mission is to plug those leaks. In the past, I’ve plugged those leaks with one of a variety of special efforts. A program, a commitment, a diet. I stop eating the wrong things at the wrong times. Then I work out, which is the equivalent of bailing out the bottom of the boat. In time, everything gets lighter and the boat rests higher in the water. It glides more easily.

But then my resolve falters and the plugs weaken. Water begins to seep back into the boat. Then the plugs give way and I’m taking on more water then before I started.

My new hypothesis (and what is more valuable than a new hypothesis?) is that if I maintain my resolve the plugs will become permanent. Like in a special effects movie, they’ll morph seamlessly with rest of the boat. The plugged-like-a-checkerboard bottom of my boat will become one perfectly integrated fiberglass hull. No leaks. No bad habits.

It seems like a long way to go, maintaining that level of resolve over enough time for it all to become new but real. But what I’ve done so far has brought me to a new place already. If I can ride the high of this “Jump-Up,” why can’t I replicate it? First this stair, and then another.

For now, I can only use the language of cautious optimism, careful disclaimers and managed expectations. This is what I have noticed.

I am apparently gaining some measure of self-control.

I don’t eat while I am making dinner, nor when I am cleaning up.

I eat less right before bed.

Previously, if I absent-mindedly put my hands on my hips I would experience a little twinge of… “That doesn’t feel good.” But now, not so much. Instead, it’s a little zap of, “That feels better. Keep going.”

I don’t wake up in the middle of the night with cravings for bad food

My impulses to eat the things that are not good for me are weaker.

I am noticing how much food I am eating. In fact, I am beginning to have consciousness about what I’m eating and how much I am eating while I am eating it. This is as opposed to realizing later, “Wait a minute, why did I do that?”

There are moments when things that are bad for me actually taste bad. I sampled a piece of cake in a coffee shop the other day and it tasted too sweet. I had heard people talk about things tasting too sweet but I always assumed they were showing off, like, “The Princess and the Pea.” “That mattress is much too uncomfortable  --  I could never sleep on that.” In the past, I have only associated “sweet” with one word: “good.”

One afternoon I decided, “I’m doing great, tonight I’ll have a beer,” but later, I forgot to have the beer. I came of age with a hundred young men who would have considered that a symptom crying out for examination, and a cure. But these days are different.

I had long fantasized that the fat around my midsection was held in place by a Velcro band, a thick, wide belt that I would some day rip off and throw away. It felt like it didn’t belong there. How could it be permanent? But every morning, there it was, and getting bigger.

I was so out of shape when I came to Breakthru Fitness that before I could sign up for the Peak program I needed a series of one-on-one sessions. My trainer would be a woman named Kanda Ferrar.

Kanda is my age, which is to say over 50. She’s raised two grown sons, rides horses, gets up at 4:30, does indescribably difficult workouts and is in better shape than I can imagine. She has short, blonde hair and moves quickly, like a knife in black spandex.

Ten minutes into our first workout I was bent over at the waist, my nose inches from my kneecaps, drops of sweat landing on my shoes, my lungs sucking for air. I was not prepared for this.

From what I had seen in health clubs, personal training sessions were leisurely affairs, the trainer leading the client from machine to machine, making sure that elbows and knees were in the right positions, no undue strain on the client’s back, and making notes on a clipboard. During my occasional forays into the weight room at my health club back in Chicago, I would hear them, the trainers and their pupils, chatting about ski trips and stock deals. This was nothing like that.

First, every exercise had a cardiac component, which explained why I was dripping wet and gasping for air. Get down on all fours. Now rise up off your knees and pretend you are running straight up a hill. Say what? I couldn’t do that one for 30 seconds.

Second, every exercise worked my core. There were several that didn’t involve pushing the weight away from my body, or pulling it toward myself; rather, they involved twisting at the waist and pulling the weight across the median of my body. This produced an immediate burning sensation in my abdomen. I know people have been working on their cores for years, but I was living in a crunch-free zone. Occasionally, I’d let my kids sock me in my gut and because I could take four or five slugs from a 10 year-old I told myself, “Good enough.” I was a runner, at least I was when I was training, and I was in decent shape. That was my story. But I knew better. My abs were soft as a baby’s butt.

Third, someone had thought these exercises all the way through. Every one touched a group of muscles I didn’t know existed. There were straps and pulleys, ropes and mats, machines and exercise balls… There was science at work here that was far beyond anything I’d ever experienced, way past pumping up biceps with bench presses.

Ten minutes into preliminary workout number one, as I teetered on the edge of oxygen deprivation, Kanda first mentioned nutrition. “What you want to do,” she said, “is stay away from dry carbs.” These she explained were bread, crackers, cereal, pasta, cake, etc. Fascinating. I could name 14 of my key weaknesses right there in that little group. What I heard her saying as I asked her to repeat the list, was, “Don’t eat these. You don’t want them. They’re not worth it. They don’t work for you. They don’t make you feel good. They’re not nutritious. So just don’t.”

I have always had a problem with, “Don’t,” and especially when it’s applied to bread. I don’t understand why the world is suddenly filled with non-bread-eating, gluten-free children; even though I’ve seen firsthand how my own kids breathe and function more cleanly when they avoid eating wheat. But how can you be allergic to bread? In church, when they give you communion, they say, “The bread of life.” It’s not, “Give us this day our daily gluten-free bread.” Life doesn’t get more basic or more essentially good than a fresh baguette. How did bread become the bad guy?

I don’t think Kanda ever actually said, “Just don’t eat…” any particular food. She did say  --  and this may have saved the day for me  --  “You don’t have to do this perfectly. Eighty percent will work.”

Eighty percent? Really?

Eighty percent seemed like a B-minus. Eighty percent seemed like a level I ought to be able to reach.

She explained that everyone has his or her favorite daily indulgence. Hers was white wine, Chardonnay. For Michelle, who created and leads the Peak Fit program, it was dark chocolate. I immediately thought of seven: blueberry muffins, chocolate chip cookies, sandwiches, beer, red wine, popcorn at the movies and ice cream after midnight. Maybe I could hold it down to one modest-sized digression per day.

Kanda talked about eating fruits and vegetables. She talked about eating protein, like meat or fish, but smaller portions, not too much. She talked about drinking enough water, which I never do. She talked about eating several times a day and not allowing myself to get hungry, which I do constantly. She said, if you don’t eat until you are very hungry you will “make bad choices.” That immediately struck me as true. In the coming days, as I began to bring a little more consciousness to the way I eat, it was easy to see that the longer I waited to eat, the worse food I ate, and the more I would undoubtedly eat. I remembered my dad’s decades of failed dieting attempts: skipping breakfast, starving himself at lunch, then blowing it all at dinner or, more likely, afterward. As I began to look carefully at the food I was eating, I realized I could eat two to three days worth of calories in about 90 minutes of screwing up.

On the other hand, if I spread the food out, didn’t allow myself to get too hungry and thought about it a little in advance, I actually could eat the right thing 80 percent of the time. I even advanced fairly quickly to the point where I wasn’t constantly bargaining: “If I eat that spoonful of pasta, will that be 22 percent exceptions for the day, or only 18?”

The great thing about being alive today is we know all this information. The data is in. Mostly, we know what to eat and what not to eat. What’s missing is the application, the “grace app,” that translates to acceptance and willingness.

There was something about the way Kanda talked that seated this program in the realm of common sense. She made it seem possible, like doing it was not that big a deal. Despite decades of failure, maybe this was a door I could sneak through; no pun intended, but maybe this was a door I could break through.

Then and there I decided that whatever I’d been doing all my life hadn’t worked. It hadn’t gotten me what I wanted; in fact, the opposite was true. My innate resistance and stubbornness hadn’t suddenly left me. I still wanted my comfort. But I wanted my results more. It wasn’t impossible. Others had done it. I had seen their before and after pictures. They were not doughnut-eaters. OK, perhaps they were occasional doughnut-eaters. They ate a few doughnuts in the 20 percent. But they weren’t in the practice of the daily stroll to the doughnut shop. I decided I wanted my results more than my comfort.

It was on the second day of the Peak program, remembering this formative session with Kanda, that I put a bowl in the sink and cracked an egg. I held the shell closed and let the egg white slide out into the bowl. Then I threw the eggshell and the yolk down the garbage disposal. I repeated this three times then swirled the four egg whites in the bowl and poured them into a hot pan. I put some salt and pepper on them and ate them. They had about a fifth the calories of eggs with yolks. They weren’t bad.

In the 10 weeks ramping up to the Peak program, Kanda would be there to beckon and/or shove me in the direction I wanted to go. I’m a sucker for anyone who sees that behind my self-deprecating cowardice is a big, fat pretentious ego aching to be challenged.

When I walked into Breakthru Fitness, changing the way I eat was in the back of my mind. Way back there in a closet where I lock up thoughts I don’t want to deal with.

I have lost nine pounds in three weeks and I am filled with hope and determination. Hope is no small feat because I was born a Lutheran and I don’t know why, but it was the most stern and unforgiving messages buzzing overhead in church and in our kitchen that stuck to me like flypaper. In recalling St. Paul’s greatest hits most people go to the wedding verses about love being patient and kind, but the one I remember is, “The good that I would do, I do not; and the evil that I would not do, I do.”

If he wasn’t talking about dieting, he could have been. The things I tell myself I will eat, I don’t eat; and the things I say I won’t eat, I eat.


If I could make just one great choice per day, and that would hold me under 2,000 calories, everything would be all right. I’m good for one good choice a day. Hell, I can make several good choices a day. But with dieting, it’s the endless opportunities to screw up that put me at a disadvantage. Dieting is like blackjack… there are so many ways it can go wrong.

The fitness program I yearn for is the one that is so rigorous you can eat anything you want and still get in great shape. But for people over 50, maybe even past 35 or 40, that fitness program is beyond the technological horizon. In the here and now, diet and exercise are forever linked; one without the other is only half a plan. There is no point in lamenting it. Would I rather eat chocolate chip cookies sliced in half lengthwise and stuffed with ice cream, or lose nine pounds in three weeks?

There seems to be a diet floating around the Breakthru Fitness club that isn’t really a diet, thank God, rather a set of guidelines that one interprets and applies as he or she will. I don’t fully understand it yet, but I like it.

At Breakthru they are part of the movement to blow up the word, “diet,” and replace it with, “nutrition.” This makes sense because over the decades news has leaked out that besides being no fun, diets don’t work.  The best thing that can happen on a diet is you give up at lunchtime of the first day. Net gain: zero. The worst is that you quickly lose 10 pounds and put 15 back on in the three months after the diet’s over. Net gain: +5.

How many people do you know who lost 20 pounds by scrupulously adhering to a diet, then went back to “eating normally,” and kept the weight off for five years? I have a friend who won a Guggenheim. I know a guy who made $15 million playing major league baseball. I know three people who have scored a hole-in-one and half a dozen who have beaten cancer, some of them against high odds. But I don’t know anyone who went on a diet, got down to his or her high school weight and kept it off for a period of years.

Getting rid of the word, “diet,” is a great idea because it has such a punitive connotation. The first question people ask when you tell them you are going on a diet is, “What are you giving up?” A diet is like living with a low-grade fever. It’s like sacrificing a large chunk of life’s joy in exchange for a result whose benefits are hard to imagine, and are probably unattainable.

The God of Diets throws a case of Fat Tire amber ale overboard into shark infested waters and says, “There! You want your beer so badly, go get it.” He backs over a layer cake with a bulldozer.

But the Goddess of Nutrition sits you down at a beautiful and well-balanced banquet. She explains that the root meaning of nutrition is the same as nourish. It means, “to feed.”

When I think of “nourish,” I think of feeding my kids. While I can use some practice at nourishing myself, I’m pretty good at feeding my children. They eat lots of fruits and vegetables. They eat when they’re hungry, not when they’re bored. They eat what their bodies are telling them they need, not what’s convenient or easy to grab. They drink lots of water and they’re not allowed to eat crap. When they really feel like a treat they can have one. We eat dinner together almost every night. Food is part of our festivals and celebrations, but it isn’t the only focal point and food itself is not the reward. We don’t eat standing up. We never eat alone. Using healthy food, well balanced and in moderation, we nourish one another.

The idea that I could use the Peak program to work on nourishing myself was intriguing. Then I opened the little guidebook that comes with the Peak course, and noticed it had a recommended diet for Week 1. I saw several notations about “egg whites.” A torrent of thoughts came rushing to the front of my mind and they weren’t pleasant. I hadn’t realized it, but apparently I have issues with “egg whites.” I was thinking, “Egg whites taste horrible.” I was thinking, “What a waste of food.” I was thinking, “No way in hell.” For some reason, egg whites symbolized ridiculousness.

The first day on the program called for me to “nourish myself” with egg whites, Brussels sprouts, lentils, cottage cheese, kidney beans and kale, for a total of about 1,800 calories. What I ate was, bacon and eggs, toast with butter, a ham and cheese sandwich with mayo as only I can make it, a cheeseburger, fries, a chocolate shake, two chilled bottles of Fat Tire Amber Ale (from the frig, not shark-infested waters) and a small pond of Diet Pepsi. It had to be 3,500 calories but I didn’t add them up.

I was snagged in a vortex of defiance, born of the kind of stubbornness that would have made St. Paul proud.

RT #5:  "Day One"

Staggering out of the workout room, the class just ended, I'm wrapped in sweat-drenched towels and borderline incoherent when a woman says to me, "Make sure you write that we're hot."

Who she meant by, "we," was the other 25 participants in the class, all of whom were women. The other gentleman participants evidently knew better than to show up for the noon class on Day One and risk being shown up by a coterie of ridiculously fit women, many of whom were moms. In any case, being the only guy (not to mention the oldest person) only intensified for me the growing sense that the workout room is a place I do not belong. 

I'll come back to the matter of "hotness," in a moment, but first, to describe a small fraction of what it is that makes everything else in the room irrelevant, including the attractiveness quotient of the other participants. Imagine an exercise in which you are holding two weights, say 15-pound dumbbells, in front of you at chest level and then, with your left foot stationary, you step to the right as far as you can, your right knee bending but not too much; as you do this, you push the weights out in front, straightening your arms and then you swing the weights to the right in a controlled, circular motion. As your arms extend fully now to the right, your right foot touches down and almost immediately springs back returning to its starting position alongside your left foot; your arms simultaneously return the weights to chest level before pressing them overhead, then returning, still under control to chest level.

OK, that hurts, that's one.

You repeat this  --  only quickly now, very quickly  --   seven times stepping to the right, for a total of eight, then do another set of eight stepping to the left. All this, 16 "repeats," you do in about 60 seconds to the beat of loud, pulsing music. (It's the only time in my life I've been in a room with music like this when I didn't have a drink in my hand.)

Feeling it? Congratulations. That's one minute down, 59 to go.

The exercise is called, "stir the pot," and I described it because it is one of the easier ones, because I have a basic understanding of it and I can perform it in a rudimentary way. Like all the exercises in the room, it works multiple systems which is to say the effort it takes to do it and the speed at which it's done leave me out of breath and the picking up and maneuvering the weights leaves my forearms, upper arms and shoulders feeling weak and jelly-like.

We've taught our kids to almost never use the word, "hate," partly because it's an angry, nasty word, but more so because it's usually inaccurate. There are really not that many things we hate, for instance, we don't actually hate our homework, and very often when we're moved to say we hate something, it's usually something else we're upset about. Hate is a word that usually obscures a deeper truth.

That disclaimer aside, I hate these exercises, especially the ones I can't do, and that's most of them. To begin, they're completely unfamiliar to me. One of my roommates in college, Craig, studied physics by explaining the concepts out loud to his dog, Rexxy, and I hadn't seen anything quite like the bemused expression on that dog's face until I caught a glimpse of myself on the mirrored wall looking at the workout leader as if to say, "Knee up, elbow down, arm kick, leg out, left, right. what?" When the cheerleaders were off behind the bleachers learning steps akin to these, I was on the field learning how to fire out of a crouch and slam another boy onto the ground. Almost four decades later that skill isn't good for much, one more example of how youth prepares women to live longer, healthier, more fluid lives than men.

Yet, even in my despair, I'm aware, as I've noted, that these exercises are not difficult and there is nothing structurally wrong with me. I will somehow create new pathways among the rusty dendrites and somewhat rigid synapses in my middle-aged brain. I'll probably start getting comfortable with them around the time the program is half over and the leaders introduce an entirely new package. It would be much worse if getting in shape hinged on my learning to play the piano or speak Russian.

The exercise ended, I try to put the weights down without dropping them and creating an embarrassing double-boom , although I want to fling them out of my hands and never see them again. I catch myself thinking, "Those damn things are like lead," when I realize, they are lead. 

There is something cool about living up to the level of an expression that represents exaggeration. I feel like a million bucks. I'm in love with the world. I have a friend who emails me every Monday morning, "Go big or go home." I don't mind being outrageous. My father wrote a book about it, but that's his story.

Coming out of the room, my arms are quivering and I wonder if I can pick up a pencil. "Make sure you write that we're hot," the woman says. Consider it done.

It was like stumbling into a Laker Girls workout, all spandex and muscle and not a lot of body fat, but without so much emphasis on hair. If it came down to a choice between hair dancing and obesity I'd have to work out with the sumo wrestler.

But what's more relevant about my fellow participants than their attractiveness quotient, or that they can move on a par with world-class dancing girls, is that they're athletes. In the cool down period, the last five minutes of class, the music slows somewhat and they slip impressively in and out of yoga poses more difficult than you'd expect from people in a class that goes up a very different side of the Zen mountain. They're strong and quick, they're thin, they have limitless endurance and they're flexible too?

The story is, they got all that by coming repeatedly into this room, so that's my plan too.
... more to come

RT #4:  The Test

Tuesday, September 20, 2011, 10:40 a.m.
 
I know a woman, 40 now, with twins, who grew up thinking people were looking at her. From the time she was a little girl, she walked a certain way, held her head just so, because she assumed she was being watched. Maybe it was a self-fulfilling prophecy, but by the time she was 8, she wound up being cast in a Broadway play.

I’ve never thought people were looking at me and, in fact, as a young reporter I worked on developing the opposite ability  -- a skill for blending in. The art of not being seen. Covering episodes of mayhem, I learned to pass through police barricades and duck beneath caution tape as if they were not there and I was invisible.

One of the most satisfying moments of my early career came one night when I was hanging around the cafeteria at police headquarters in Chicago looking for information about a gang shooting. It was about 2 a.m. and I was sitting by myself at a table with a Styrofoam cup of coffee, when a detective sat down in front of me and said, “All right, here’s what happened.” He proceeded to describe the crime with the kind of detail cops never share with reporters. I furiously took notes and had almost the entire story when the lawyer from the state’s attorney’s office walked up and introduced himself. This was the guy the detective was looking for when he sat down across from me by mistake. 

The cop looked at me and said, “Who the hell are you?”

“City News Bureau.”

Choice words were then shouted.

Last Sunday morning, more than 100 people where inside Breakthru Fitness to be weighed, measured, have their “before” pictures taken, and take a fitness test. This was the orientation for the “Peak” fitness program (as I write this, my first official workout begins in one hour and 20 minutes) and I could feel the nerves in the crowd, not just my own.

I’ve been working out for 10 weeks just to get ready for this program, and I’ve lost six pounds, down from 226 to 220, but I’d still rather not take my shirt off in public. Fortunately there is a screen and I stand behind it, visible only to the photographer and some of the assistants logging information on clipboards. Side view, front view, and then the photographer asks me to flex  --  say What?  --  arms up, fists to the sides of my head like a boxer. One click and now that picture is floating around somewhere.

I’m surprised and disappointed to find that the scale, the accurate, doctor’s office kind with the balance bar, is not working. It has me at 224, but rather than complain I immediately go into the locker room where there is a digital scale I know works correctly. It puts me at 223.8. Bizarre coincidence that both scales are malfunctioning four pounds heavy on the same day.

I don’t want to take the fitness test and I’m thinking maybe I should postpone this test due to injury. Sometimes when I run for more than an hour, one of my calf muscles will tighten up like a steel knot, and when it’s bad it means three weeks of limping. I ran seven miles yesterday, if you can call this running  --  staggering north from Garfield Park past the 210 and back in an hour and 20 minutes, but still, it was depleting. It would be stupid to screw up and miss three weeks of the Peak program just because I wasn’t willing to back off a little bit at the outset and not do this test.

There are other reasons this test might not be right for me. The test is a series of programmed failures, 10 exercises taken one at a time  --  pushups, burpees, side lunges, etc  --  each performed for 60 seconds, as many as  you can do, until you are lying in a puddle of your own sweat, tongue hanging out, unable to do a single one more. Then 60 seconds of rest and when the bell rings, literally, you tear into the next one. I’m concerned this might not be good for my self-esteem; I’m probably going to need my self-esteem to be healthy and intact in order to summon the confidence I’ll need to complete this program.

Self-esteem is crucial when I’m trying to persuade myself I can do something that, objectively, I may not be able to do. The people running this program are going to ask me to stop eating large amounts of nutritionally derelict food. I don’t know if I can do that. If I were capable of it, wouldn’t I have done it already? I’m fine when I’m in the club. The club is not the kind of place where office workers shaped like bowling balls bring in layer cakes to celebrate the fact that it’s Wednesday. But they don’t let you move in to the club. I have to walk around in my life where dozens of times a day, a voice in my head offers me food that will blow that delicate caloric equation (calories in + 500 = calories out) right out of the water.

Then there is the exercise component. If this was about jogging around the Rose Bowl, or running up and down on an asphalt court playing pickup basketball, or even swimming, I know I could do that. But floor exercises in a mirrored room on a gleaming wood floor surrounded by a lot of really good-looking people in spandex? If you go up for a rebound in a city park pickup game and the sweat of some middle-aged guy with three knee braces goes flying in your eyes, you can’t complain. It’s not a genteel milieu. But if everyone in the pristine fitness room is slide stepping left-right and I go right-left, mowing down a 98-pound mother of triplets from San Marino, they might ask me to leave and who could blame them?

Fear is like a rainstorm that makes me want to come to my senses and go home. Tea and cornbread. Fear is the rain that fills the garden with weeds of doubt.

I’m afraid to go in the room and only slightly more afraid not to. I am called to it. I am called to the moment that occurs in there by design, when there isn’t anything left, no more energy, no more will, but there has to be. I’ve been in rooms like this before and I know it’s consecrated to the purpose of moving its occupants to the edge, where the next moment of performance hangs off the cliff of wonder and dangles over the chasm of doubt. Can you do it? It’s the vortex of the perpetual question. It’s life on the frontier of uncertainty. That’s why relatively few people go in the room. It’s the test most of us don’t want to take.

                    *****

“Anyone who didn’t do 20 pushups, you can leave now,” the football coach inside my mind is saying. ““Twelve pushups? Twelve (12)? Just get out. You’ve been given the gift of a human body. You’ve been given a brain that’s capable of more than any computer ever invented. You’ve been given a heart that is more sophisticated than any pump, any single piece of technology ever devised. Lungs, muscles, blood, all of it…. beyond incredible. Yet, how do you treat it? You feed your body crap when you know better. You feed your mind endless amounts of drivel. You sit around giving in to sloth. You stay up late indulging your anxiety when you should be sleeping.

“Twelve pushups in 60 seconds? Not 20? Not 15, much less 50? Are you kidding? The only thing you are going to produce here is embarrassment. Quit while you’re ahead. Go home. Now.”

But the sound that filled the room, not the inside of my head, the voice that came over the music and the beat, belonged to the mic’d woman wearing the headset, encouraging in the 60-second intervals that came between the onslaughts. “You’re doing great, you look really great.” I looked up from where I was wiping the floor with my towel, slick like glass with sweat where I had collapsed, thinking she might be kidding, but she was not, she was smiling and she meant it and she seemed aware of me, as I pondered the predicament of disappearing, taxing my talent for going unseen, challenging in this cafeteria, how to conceal a water buffalo in a room full of mirrors and spandex.

But there was no time for anything because the bell was ringing, the music was accelerating, the next test was starting. Life in the vortex of the 13th pushup here in the Last Chance Saloon.

stay tuned...