I am two months into a new stage of the “getting healthy” journey. The journey that began two years ago when I decided it was time to lose the weight — that my aging bones could no longer handle the extra me.
It’s not obvious when someone meets me, but there was a time when I played a lot of sports. Basketball was my thing, but I also would have been called a gym rat, if the lingo had existed back then. I had forgotten how good it feels to put in the work. Truly forgotten.
And when my family pressured me to go back to the gym, it felt more like an imposition of fate than something born from my own desire.
The first couple of weeks were not great, I won’t lie. The pain in my joints, along with the bruised ego, made me think about “an alternative” often. An alternative I know doesn’t exist.
It’s somewhat hard, at least for us silly men, to watch younger people leave us behind. Every day I’m in the gym, I have to remind myself not to ego lift and risk injury. It almost feels like mental training more than physical training at times.
You see, it’s a common thing in the gym. Men, silly as we can be, enjoy feeling a little primal sometimes. Strength is not only something we value for its utility, but also something tied to social ranking. The unspoken code between us is that a stronger man is, almost instinctively, respected first. We can of course reassess that impulse intellectually, but the first reaction is often still there.
All that said, I’ve surprised myself quite a bit too. I’m recovering some of my old strength, but more importantly, the back pain and shoulder pain are completely gone.
As someone who has dealt with sciatica for decades, this still feels alien to me at times. But of course, I’m not complaining.
I doubt anyone reads my rants for life advice, but in the event that someone ever does, this one nugget of wisdom feels worth sharing:
It’s never too late to fight entropy.
And it’s OK if you suck in the beginning.
— MenO
