04 - Something Is Wrong With Me, Part 1

Every story starts somewhere. This one actually began with what I consider in halted retrospect to be one of the flashiest stupid decisions I ever spontaneously made in my young life.

My friend Andrew has always been something of an inspiration to me, which is a good sort of balance to strike in a friendship since in conversation he's shared with me that I am equally so to him in perpendicular areas. This way we don't clash and compete at much of anything, we just interact with a kind of casual comfort of mutual acknowledged awesomeness. It's a good friendship to have.

I hope you have one like that with somebody, Walking Buddy.

Andrew's a cool little contradiction of a young man. He likes computers and hardware, loves to take things apart and then build them back together again but with lasers, and so on. On top of that, he's also a part-time traceur (that's what people who do parkour, or free-running, call themselves), and a sometime participant in allegedly fun athletic prove-yourself events like the Warrior Dash or the Great Gauntlet of Masochism or whatever other names they've come up with for those completely unnecessary national runs with obstacle courses designed to teach Americans just how fat and lazy we all don't want to admit we are through hugely public failure to complete them. And then at the end, you paid to be there, so you don't even get to complain to anybody about it being unfair or feeling forced into it. It's all very silly, which is what makes it so funny to watch.

At least, that was my line of thinking about them up until the day when Andrew messaged me to mention he was putting together a team for a Tough Mudder event in Virginia Beach this coming June. My response was something like, "Well, have fun with that, and by fun I mean am I already in your will? Because that would be cool if we got that ironed out."

Then he asked me to join the team. He had this whole persuasive argument prepared which was really rather masterful for him, who is usually a pretty plainspoken fellow without much interest in formalized debate. The argument had as its major thrust the thesis that just because a fellow is not in fact fit and in shape nor remotely athletically inclined, it doesn't mean he can't run a special forces-level training course in five months if he elects to and is willing to change his entire life routine to that end. Which is, let's be honest, true only in the most technical and least practical fashion. It is equally as possible that within five months I could be a competent professional juggler street artist living and sleeping under a bench in a St. Louis city park, or a humbled and nature-attuned rice farmer working a paddy in Southeast Asia waiting for my dark past to catch up to me, or a moderately successful writer receiving pay for his work for the first time. All of these seemed exactly as likely as me being able to not die for twelve miles in a row on a Tough Mudder course.

So naturally, I said yes.

It turns out that I am no less immune to the creeping notion that I am living substantially underneath my actual potential than just about any other young red-blooded American male who has never swung from a vine and rescued a damsel from a gorilla or something. Deep down underneath my substantial video game collection, my assortment of essentially-healthy and well-formed friendships with others and my family, and my aspirations to be a professional writer that I'd just never had the guts to take the first step on... there was a hole in there, well-hidden. Somewhere inside, I was aware that I had never been all that manly, really, and the idea that a single effort, a mere attempt at something undeniably manly might earn me enough credit to never have to worry about it again down the road... Well, it was actually, briefly attractive.

An unfortunate counter-convenience truth is that in the digital era, "briefly" is exactly long enough a time to put in your credit card information and spend almost two hundred dollars on a nonrefundable signup fee for an event you will regard with amazed terror and disbelief two minutes from now. For a penniless writer living with his best friend and sharing finances, what I had just done was a betrayal of Judas-level proportions, much as if I'd waited at the front door for her to come home from work with two weeks' groceries strewn at our feet and lit it on fire in front of her eyes, dancing a merry devil's jig. I was mortified. Andrew was sort of happy, though.

This turned out to be the very beginning of my early warning system that Something Would Be Wrong With Me within several months. If I hadn't gone against everything I understood and believed in order to sign up for an event I had no actual interest in nor faith in my ability to complete, against my best friend's wishes and knowledge and despite my poverty and general sluggish level of physical activity, and toward the end of proving something to myself and anybody else who gave a damn (which was nobody) which even I had to admit I don't actually really care about... I would never have had my very first clear warning sign.

I put off my training for three solid months in a row, during which I faithfully paid for a gym membership that I hadn't actually used yet. Classic stuff, really, as faux motivation and the barest shadow of pre-accomplishment back-patting goes. Then one day I put in a couple more job applications (long since having given up the hope of any of them coming back with anything but crickets), realized it was only noon, and that I really had no excuse to slog over to my chair and put in a video game. So I went to the gym instead. And it was awful, exactly as you'd expect: my flailing efforts in the machines, wheezing on the treadmill, and puzzled head-cocked studying of the how-to diagrams on the equipment like an archaeologist studying Egyptian hieroglyphs in the bowels of a pyramid all told a grand tale of That Rookie Guy At The Gym, again which nobody noticed or even cared about since they were busy running eighty miles before breakfast and being in shape for the airplane-pull they'd be doing this afternoon.

But hey. I'd pulled motivation out of the air (out of the beginning miasma of real despair at my stagnant financial and professional situation, in honest retrospect, actually, which I am sort of proud of since most people don't just take flight once they're already sinking) and gotten my ass out there, and two days later I did it again, and before I knew it I'd actually spent a week having gone to the gym. And from there, I could do another week the same way, and I actually began to find the beginnings of a new routine. My focus became on building endurance; I knew Tough Mudder was a long race from obstacle to obstacle, so I wanted to make sure I could run a sufficient total distance that I'd be able to make the whole length in one go if I had to. Andrew had told me (somewhat reluctantly, as if afraid that providing me this information would simply ensure I would do it for every single one with 100% certainty) that any participant can elect to just run or walk right around any obstacle they don't feel like trying, anytime they want. After all, the thing's not actually a competition. There is no winner, because it isn't a race. You just finish it, or you don't, and either way they got your money and you got your... whatever you came there to find. So in the end, my lofty goal was to be able to run twelve miles in one sustained effort, so that in case Andrew got far enough ahead of me that he'd have no idea I could in fact just skip every precarious climbing wall and icy water pit and freaking hanging live electrical wires (yes, that is a real Tough Mudder obstacle, I am told) if I wasn't feeling suicidal that day.

I eventually got up to seven miles, and I was so elated afterward that I had to admit that I'd stopped more because I was really damned bored on the treadmill than because I couldn't do any more. I hadn't reached my goal yet, but I was improving at something on absolutely no steam but my own for the first time in years, being challenged for the first real time in years, and that was worth everything to me. In gratitude, I gave myself the next gym visit off. This is, of course, about as logical as rewarding a prisoner for three weeks of good behavior by giving him a gun and a set of keys, so I doubt you'd really be surprised to hear that my next visit off stretched into the following weekend, and by the time I did drag my ass back to the gym five full days had passed since my last exercise of any kind. Momentum thoroughly broken.

And just like it was my ridiculous notion that I could be a Tough Mudder participant which first clued me in that Something Was Wrong With Me, it was my sheepish guilt at having waited that long since my last workout which gave me my first misdiagnosis excuse, that It Was Probably Nothing After All. Because when I could only run five and a half miles that next time before I felt absolutely awful, like worse by far than I ever had even leading up to the original seven, I already had a reason to explain it away. And that reason was that I sucked at dedication and had let my momentum slip, and as a result I'd lost a lot of conditioning in a very short time by breaking my momentum. Had I been thinking more clearly, or had a high school coach or someone to run it by, I might have been made aware of the fact that the body doesn't atrophy at nearly the speed at which it can grow and be made stronger; basically, there is little chance that I should have lost that much ground and potential in such a short time not running.

I ignored the sign, and I missed my first warning signal. I was too willing by far to believe the fault was mine, having spent the past years being convinced by life, the job market, the world and my own subconscious of my own great potential worthlessness that it was no great stretch for me to conclude that if something was wrong, it was because I had screwed it up. But I was wrong; greater and subtler forces were already at work here.

...How we doing, Walking Buddy? Why don't we call it a day here. Dogs're gonna be barking if we keep on for now, I think. I can pick up the story tomorrow, and we can stroll on a bit farther. Plenty of road left to go, both between here and where I sit now, and stretching ahead of me into the distance besides.

In the meantime, though, try and remember what I already know to be true: your real intelligence, wisdom, mental agility or whatever... it's not about how much you know. I'm not an idiot for missing that first signal I just mentioned before. How sharp you really are, that's in how fast you learn. Adapt. Alter course, change plans, remain flexible. Remember that for yourself as well, because none of us are blessed to know everything we're going to need to know to get out every time life throws us into the fire. But in the end, the ones who survive and are made better aren't, by and large, the ones who were great smoking know-it-alls going in anyway.

It's the ones who watch the walls as they're falling, burning but aware, mentally marking the handholds they're going to be using to get back out again even as they sail down into the flames and the dark.

Catch you tomorrow, Walking Buddy.

- Gabriel, Slightly Charred But No Less Cool For The Fact