I Exaggerate
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I'm a very busy person and my plate is full.
Full of crumbs, that is. Perhaps if I scrape them together there'll be a sufficient heap of stuff to get me to the gym. Each crumb is a remnant of responsibility, need, desire, discipline and obligation, with a few flecks of inspiration along the edges.
What's this? Yuk, a morsel of guilt. Trouble is, I don't have an appetite.
However, I do have excuses: The gym is thirty minutes down the road, the truck's dirty and the traffic stinks; it's cold, windy and grey outside and my favorite T-shirt's in the washer and there's a newsletter to write.
I'll go to the gym tomorrow.
Crazy! There was a time sixty years ago I had nothing I'd rather do than go to the gym. Fifty years ago contests were coming up...off to the gym. Forty years ago I ran the juice bar in the gym. Thirty years ago I owned the gym. Twenty years ago the gym owned me. Fifteen years ago I morphed into the Bomber writing tales about the gym. Boom-Zoom.
Today, "I'll go to the gym tomorrow"? I don't think so.
I've heard rumors of people who did the "I'll go tomorrow" act and haven't been seen or heard of since. Story goes they stepped too far from the pull of gravity and drifted into the worldly wastelands. Life in the world minus the tug of iron is often pointless and demoralizing, fattening and enfeebling.
I exaggerate. It's not as if postponing a workout shrivels your biceps like prunes or causes your obliques to hang down in gushy slabs over your beltline or make your butt wobble and sag. The absence of one training session does not result in the deterioration of hard-earned musculature. It's scientifically impossible.
Calm down, lighten up.
Two workouts without the iron, however, and you're in big trouble: Bloating, drooping and drooling are inevitable. Three and it's too late -- delirium and bed-wetting are not uncommon. Four and you're tabloid headlines...cute photos. And five, they forget your name -- you become a tube-fed number and are assigned a cot in Ward X.
Dave who? The what? Never heard of him.
I don't care if it's all in my mind. For a lifetime, if I miss a workout, I'm overcome with anger, guilt and irrational behavior. I'm bitter and cruel one minute and pouty and sad the next. I pull on a baggy sweatshirt only to rip it off and replace it with a size-small black tank top with "I'm Bad" slashed in red across the back.
Then, I'm in the bathroom crying for no reason.
I do not like to skip my workouts. I cannot afford to. Time is short. I only have sixty-some years invested in the action-packed activity, the first six or seven wasted on tag, kickball and the alphabet. Time is of the essence. Time is muscle. Time flies.
Time out for a shot of protein. Yummy, yummy, good for your tummy...and good for your muscles, too.
We're told when lifting the iron is no longer appealing, when we'd rather be changing a greasy truck transmission or undergoing a liver transplant, it's not the workout that's out of order, it's the attitude. Iron is iron, it's lifeless. We -- you and I who live and lift -- are the problems, the troubled, the weak, the lost.
Gee, thanks for the head trip. Another heavy load to carry, as if the metal wasn't enough.
Attitudes are not fashionable or transformable like colorful balloons in the white-gloved hands of a party clown -- blow them up, stretch them here, twist them there and tie them all together. Squeak, squeak, squeak...a happy face. It is, in fact, the working out that transforms the attitude.
Move that metal.
Remember, missing a training session is not an option unless you fall from a three-story window, take a bullet in the butt or are beamed up to Pluto. Not likely, nice try. The only solution to attitude-failure, training-ennui or workout letgosis is to drag yourself to the gym burdens and all, and dump them when you get there. Kerplunk! There's no load too heavy that a hearty workout won't fix, moderate or eradicate.
Push that iron.
You can work seriously on your funky attitude before you heave the weighted bars, but why bother when in ten minutes under their force, the mind is revived, riveted and recharging anyway. Attitudes are unstable wavelengths. You can think positive, imagine life is neat, suggest to your unconscious you will have a grand workout, but the fact is in the act.
Lift that steel.
I get a headache when I think positive. Besides being strenuous, it's like admitting I'm negative and need a fix. Rather, I go straight for the fix. I dash to the iron, grasp it and toss it around the gym. Thud, crash, clank.
It puts up a pretty good fight, even the light stuff, but I always win. It's certain; even if I lose, I win.
We know the inside of a gym and the underside of a loaded bar. We know there was a time -- early childhood or so it seems -- when planning our training was vitally important: the order of exercises, the sets and the reps. Today we know our training so well we can go by smell. The nose knows. Too much planning puts a tickle in me ole schnozolla.
I can talk myself out of a good workout -- the greatest invigorator of the body, mind and soul -- by thinking too much about it. "I don't want to go to the gym," is not a casual thought I share with myself.
I'm succinct:
Go gym -- plentiful rewards in powerful hands
No gym -- tremendous burdens on trembling shoulders
Be there or be square. Or, probably, round: floppy in the wings, dumpy in the tail.
This is your captain speaking...Trim your ailerons, bombers, suck in that fuselage...we're flying high.
Dave
*****
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