This is a great time to be fit. But it wasn’t always that way.
When I was growing up, if you weren’t on a team with a coach of some sort drilling you every afternoon, if you were an ordinary kid with a bug in your ear about getting in shape, you hardly knew where to begin.
Nowadays, the info about health, wellness, exercise, nutrition is everywhere you turn. Magazines. Talk shows. Cable stations. Infomercials. Cereal boxes. Really, does the world need another fitness column?
There’s almost too many choices to make sense of as it is. But I believe that the Whos, Whats, Wheres and Whens of fitness aren’t the issue. It’s the Why of fitness that I’m concerned with. Why to get fit, why to stay fit. "Why"’ is the glue that will hold your fitness regimen together and keep you stuck to it through all of the tough stuff.
Lack of a compelling reason Why keeps so many from getting on the bandwagon of wellness and ensures that many will fall off. But the reasons Why are everywhere, way beyond the waistline anxieties in the mirror or the numbers on the scale.
Take a good look at the demands that life places on each of us. Take a good look at the faces of those in our lives and our communities who depend on us for help and inspiration.
Here’s what I recommend: Before settling on a step class or a spin class, the rowing station, weight station, leg, lat or cardio station, everybody should pay a visit to the Motivation Station.
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One of the things I discuss repeatedly is what I call "The Four Seasons of Fitness." Springtime is of particular note; a time of personal renewal in sync with nature’s own annual rebirth; spring is a perfect reminder that there are always second chances. So much so that there should be a rallying cry around the proposition that all New Year’s resolutions be made on May 1.
Well hopefully you took spring up on its offer, because summer’s been a real kicker, as usual. So many things to do outdoors, plus the occasional guilty pleasure to be found in the air-conditioned relief of a movie theater. Is it me, or did it seem like the summer blockbuster season revved up earlier this year than ever? From the Allwood Cinemas on Market Street to the theaters at Clifton Commons on Route 3, from the Bellevue on Bellevue to the Essex Green screens, the time for heroes arrived as well. In summers past, it zoomed into the multiplexes with webs, capes, big guns, big cars and Will Smith. This year, it’s been archaeologists with whips and fedoras, technologically advanced suits of armor, bigger guns, bigger cars and Will Smith.
Let’s face it; summer is much more than a time for grilling and volleyball; much more than an excuse for absorbing beer and curly fries in the heat of the shore, or popcorn and coke in the cool of the movie theater. Summer is a time for heroes. What’s not to love about that?
So maybe it’s a perfect time to explore our fascination with action heroes. They’ve been with us, after all, since the beginning of written history. Gilgamesh. Samson. The 300 at Thermopylae. Hector, Achilles and Odysseus. The gladiators of Rome. Washington and his troops at Valley Forge. Both Tecumseh and Tecumseh Sherman. Jack Armstrong, Neil Armstrong, Lance Armstrong. Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano, Muhammed Ali. Hey, fill in your own favorites.
Their stories supply us with two things vital to the human condition, as vital as air and water: entertainment and inspiration. Vital maybe, but not of equal importance. I mean, while I like entertainment as much as the next guy, I need inspiration — every danged day, it seems.
Take January’s Giants/Packers game. Unquestionably entertaining, perhaps more so than the Giants’ Super Bowl performance a couple of weeks later. But inspirational? Recollecting Manning and crew’s defiance of both the odds and the sub-zero Minnesota cold fueled my outdoor workouts for the rest of the winter.
One could argue that, in the midst of a financial, and therefore psychological recession, we as people need the distraction that entertainment brings. But distraction does not make us stronger, does it?
Inspiration, on the other hand, gives us power. Power to endure, to triumph, to remain on-course and on-purpose and on top. Dictators throughout history knew this truth and used it to keep their subjects, well, subjugated: a dependance on entertainment makes a people weak, but a thirst for inspiration makes them strong.
So what does this have to do with the Giants, or Indy, or Batman or Iron Man, Kung-Fu Panda, a pre-pregnancy Angelina Jolie in tights or, well, whatever the heck Hancock is? Maybe, just maybe, when so many forces in life, in the workplace and the marketplace endeavor to make us feel every day more pointless and powerless, the sight of people who can patently do anything means, well, means something important to us.
Like a jungle vine to Indy, a rope of webbing to Spiderman, an elevator cable to Bruce Willis’ John McClane, it’s something to hold onto, to climb, to muscle us up, yearningly, to a higher place. A better version of ourselves.
And what would it mean, even if we could do anything and everything? There was a cheesy B-movie in the heart of the ’80s called "Runaway Train." A B-movie with pedigree, because it was adapted from a screenplay by Kurosawa. Also because it starred the great Jon Voight, in the meaty middle of his career, playing a total hard-case convict in a maximum-security prison, the frozen Alaska winter echoing his dead merciless heart. Earned him an Oscar nomination, along with one for a young Eric Roberts, playing a green Southern boxer sent up on statutory rape. An Oscar nomination for Eric Roberts? You’ve got to see this one. As I said, total cheese, but one of my favorites nonetheless. Of course the Jon Voight character, ‘Manny’ Manheim, attempts a breakout. Of course the Southern kid tags along. Of course they sneak aboard a speeding train, after which the conductor croaks and the brakes burn off, hence, ta-dah! "Runaway Train."
In my favorite scene, Manny forces the kid to attempt a scramble over the ice-encrusted engine to get to the other side so he can jimmy the hydraulic brake cables, or some-such. Naturally, he can’t make it, crawling back in the cabin door gasping, "I can’t do it, I can’t do it, Manny." And kicking him in disgust, the indomitable Manny, who has endured a lifetime of indignities and incarceration, at war with the worlds of both men and nature, says, "You don’t know what you can do and what you can’t do."
You don’t know what you can do and what you can’t do. A fine truth, absolutely, and an inspiring cinematic moment.
But after struggling against sciatica for two years, trying to keep the pain and discomfort at bay and the fitness, flexibility and fun of life in the forefront, I’ve realized an even greater truth: It’s not being able to do everything that makes you great. In fact, it’s not what you can do or what you can’t do at all. It’s what you do in spite of the things you can’t do. This makes greatness.
A recent news-blurb on a double-amputee sprinting to Olympic qualification on what looks like a cross between kangaroo feet and truck leaf-springs comes to mind. Or the brave and beautiful gal who got back on her surfboard a couple of years ago after a shark-bite took away half her board along with her arm. Or another arm left, a couple of years before that, wedged under a rock at the top of a mountain while its owner made it back home thanks to, well, nothing more that I can think of than Herculean will. This is greatness; this is heroism. This is inspiration.
This is what we need to focus on, you and I, when we’re moving iron at one Y or swimming laps at the other, bootcamping in any of our fine parks, blasting up through the belts at Master So-and So’s Dojo, or enduring that funky yoga routine that they do with the heat turned all the way up. This, and one other thing.
There’s something I never tire of speaking about. It is the secret reason why some of us train (and more of us should), striving for our best physical selves, our maximum effort. The reason that transcends the way our jeans fit, the way we look in the mirror or on the beach.
Not such a secret, really, if you’ve been paying any attention to Indy, Hellboy or this year’s Will Smith. The people, this world full of people who need us. The people we know and the people we haven’t met yet, but who are going to need us nonetheless. Believe me, because this I know to be true: there is, on any given day, far more opportunity for heroism around us than on all of the movie screens imaginable.
The question is, will we be ready?
These summer months zoom by so quickly, I hope you’ve filled yours to the brim with all of the celebrations of life, taking time for training in whatever form suits you, for this is a premiere celebration of life.
And by all means, as much as you’ve soaked up the sun’s rays, soak up without guilt those improbable but no less inspirational celluloid exploits in the cool of our local movie theaters. Soak up their lessons and put them to good use, swooping down out of the bat-winged night to change the lives of those in need.
Put all your training to work, give it a reason. The very best reason in fact: To make a difference.
And rest assured, as the seasons change and the theaters turn their screens over to calmer, more introspective fare, there’ll still be old ladies with groceries, cars with stalled engines to push, friends with couches to move or children to grab before they chase a ball into traffic. It never ends. Summer blockbuster seasons come and go, but the time is always right for heroes.
