FITNESS CONFIDENTIAL (11 page)
Read FITNESS CONFIDENTIAL Online
Authors: Vinnie Tortorich,Dean Lorey
Sold yet?
But wait, there’s more!
It weighs less than a pound! It’s portable and completely collapsible! Not only will it fit inside a briefcase, it will actually fit inside your shaving kit! You can take it on vacation! You can take it to the office! You can have fun with it at the beach!
Sold yet?
But wait, there’s more!
It’s safe and there are no moving parts to break! It’s virtually indestructible! And it’s so simple to use that it doesn’t even need to come with instructions! It’s also unisex, equally effective for both men and women! Plus, kids love it, too!
Now how much would you expect to pay for an item that does all this?
Remember, the Range Of Motion machine costs around fifteen thousand dollars, so something this spectacular should cost at least twice that, right? But it’s not thirty thousand dollars. It’s not even twenty thousand dollars. In fact, if you buy the very best one available, you might spend twelve.
Not twelve thousand.
Twelve dollars.
But you should really expect to pay somewhere in the neighborhood of three to five.
So what is this miraculous device? Is it a technological marvel that was recently invented by NASA for the space program? Nope. It’s been around for a long time and you probably even had one when you were a kid. Want to know what it is?
A jump rope.
When my clients ask me to name the best piece of fitness equipment, I always tell them the jump rope because it does it all. It works everything and costs nothing. If you want to buy something, buy that. It delivers. Not everything does, which is why I start every podcast by saying, “Your good intentions have been stolen and I’m here to help you get ‘em back.”
Get ready. I feel a rant coming.
Maybe you’ve always been overweight.
Or maybe an extra twenty or thirty pounds have crept up on you and you want to get rid of them.
Either way, you’ve finally decided to do everything you can to get yourself trim, healthy and feeling great. So, with the best of intentions and a positive attitude, you buy useless supplements or crappy fitness gadgets to help you achieve your goals. They don’t work and you get burned. Which isn’t so terrible if it happens once or twice. But if you get burned enough times, you’ll give up trying to get healthy.
Which is why these products make me so angry.
The very stuff that’s supposed to be helping you is subverting your good intentions, and you’re paying for the privilege! And it’s not just bad food, bad drugs or bad equipment that’s keeping us from being the people we want to be. Have you ever noticed how hard it is to do anything worthwhile? It’s like the universe conspires to stop us from meeting our goals, from creating, from succeeding. Would you like to hear the two things that people constantly tell me they plan on doing?
Write a book.
Run a marathon.
You know how many people actually end up doing these things? Almost none. Which is crazy if you think about it. Writing a book and running a marathon cost just about exactly the same.
Nothing.
If you can afford paper, you can write a book. If you can afford shoes, you can run a marathon. Hell, you don’t even really need the shoes! There’s no special equipment involved. And yet, very few people who say they’re going to do these things actually end up doing them. Why? There’s an old saying:
Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up.
It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed.
Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death.
It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle:
when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.
–African Proverb
This is true for lions and gazelle everywhere, except one place—captivity. They don’t run because they don’t have to. Their food is provided for them. All they have to do is eat it. So they sit there lounging and grazing contentedly, not realizing that the price they’ve paid for this easy living is that they’re stuck in a cage until they die.
We’re the same way.
We’ve created a world where, for the most part, we’re not going to starve, we’re not going to get eaten and, as shitty as our health care system is, we’re basically going to get taken care of. We don’t wake up running because we don’t have to.
Like the lions and gazelles in captivity, we’ve been trained to ignore our natural instincts to create things and move our bodies and accomplish goals, not realizing that there’s a terrible price to be paid for this supposed “easy living.” And the price is that we’ve lost the will and drive to do the big things we tell ourselves we’ll get around to doing, like finish that book or run that marathon, because they don’t have to be done.
But that’s not the way it used to be.
Legend has it that the very first marathon was run when a Greek guy named Pheidippides was sent from the town of Marathon to Athens to announce that the Persians had been defeated. He was so excited that he ran the entire way without stopping and then collapsed from exhaustion. That’s how the marathon was created. I’ve always thought that if they’d just given this poor bastard a horse, you’d be hard pressed to find a famous Kenyan today.
The point is, it’s easy to say you’re going to do something but hard to actually do it when it’s not a matter of life or death, so we look for excuses not to.
In my business, I probably hear more excuses than cops and teachers combined. They get “a dog ate my homework” and “it wasn’t me, officer.” I get everything else. You wouldn’t believe the stuff people tell me to avoid working out. I get a lot of calls from parents who say that they can’t work out later that day because “I have to pick my kids up at school/soccer/friend’s house.”
Usually, I mess with them a little and tell them “that’s no problem. I’m going to be passing by your kid’s school/soccer/friend’s house on the way to yours. I’ll pick them up for you and then we can still work out.” At this point, to get out of that, their lie just becomes bigger and more convoluted.
In fact, that reminds me of a quick story. I was heading to a client’s house when she called to tell me she couldn’t work out. “Sorry, Vinnie,” she said, apologetically. “But I’m stuck in traffic and I’m not going to make it home in time.”
Okay, I thought. That happens. “No problem,” I told her.
But she didn’t stop talking, which is how I knew she wasn’t Italian because, as every Italian knows, the less you talk, the better off you are.
“I’m on the 101,” she continued, “and it’s a parking lot right now.”
Okay, I thought again. The 101 gets like that. Of course, at the time, I was on the 101 headed to her house and it didn’t look like a parking lot to me, but maybe she was on a different part of it.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said.
But still she kept talking.
“I’m at the Reseda exit. I’m stuck here. Traffic hasn’t moved an inch for ten minutes.”
Funny thing was, I was on the 101 at the Reseda exit and I was doing seventy. Which reminds me of another Vinnie-ism.
If you’re gonna lie, keep it simple
.
I could have called her on it but that’s just not something I do. Most of my clients are not lazy people. They’re Hollywood types—writers, actors, directors, executives—and they often work crazy hours. Sixteen-hour days are not uncommon. So I cut them some slack, even when their excuses are long-winded and lame.
Even though they don’t need to write an opera to explain why they don’t want to work out, there’s one excuse that’s a guaranteed “Get Out Of Workout Free” card with me. If they say they have a physical ailment of any sort—back pain, a pulled muscle, a severe headache—I have to respect it. I may be a lie detector, but I’m not an MRI machine.
If someone complains of a physical problem, as far as I’m concerned, as a professional, it’s game over. They can work out another day. Their health is my number one priority.
Which brings up another point.
Because so many of my clients are creative types, I see a lot of drug use. It’s no secret that Hollywood and drugs go hand in hand. It’s not my moral obligation to judge my client’s pharmaceutical escapades, but I always demand to know what they’re on. If I hear any sort of speed, coke or meth, the workout’s off and it means we’re going to spend the next hour hanging out and talking. If they took a downer, I’ll usually help them get undressed and put them to bed, even if it’s noon.
But crazy and convoluted excuses aren’t the only ones I get. I also hear a lot of simple, stupid ones. You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve heard these to avoid working out:
“I have a hangnail.”
“I have to wash my hair.”
And (my favorite)
cough
,
cough
, “I think I’m getting sick.”
The
cough, cough
always makes me laugh. But the excuse I probably hear most often, in a hundred different flavors, is that people just don’t have “the time”—which is odd because we have more time saving devices in our lives now than at any other point in the history of the world. We don’t have to catch, kill, butcher or grow our own food any more. Let’s face it, hunting, fishing and gardening is what we do now to relax.
But I get it.
We lead busy lives and it’s difficult to find the time to keep up a workout schedule. And time is not the only obstacle we face. What about negativity? We’re constantly bombarded with it. Once you start losing weight and getting fit, what do the people around you say?
Sure, some will be positive.
“You look great!”
But others won’t be so kind.
“You’re getting too thin! You look unhealthy!”
“Be careful about putting on all that muscle. It’s going to turn to fat!”
I helped my nephew drop over sixty pounds in just under five months and he looked and felt better than he ever had in his life. But what did the people around him say?
“You’re too thin! You need to put some of that weight back on!”
Bear in mind, at this point he was still a good ten pounds above his optimal weight. People were quick to tell him that he wasn’t eating healthy and he should go back to eating like they do.
“Who are these people?” I asked.
“My friends. Co-workers and family,” he replied. Then he realized something. “You know what? Everyone who tells me that stuff is obese.”
He told me that his new way of eating wasn’t difficult to follow, the hard part was the people around him making it difficult. They would literally try to sabotage him by taking him to pizza joints to get him to eat food he knew was going to be bad for him. He asked me why they were doing this.
“You’re basically holding up a mirror to everyone around you,” I told him. “And they don’t like what they see. Because you’re succeeding, they see themselves as failures.”
He wanted to know what he should say to everyone so he could help educate them. I told him to say nothing. Just do your thing. Lead by example. Or, to give you another Vinnie-ism (God help me):
Nobody wants to hear it. Everyone wants to see it.
He ended up leading by example and is now looking and feeling great.
Don’t let all the negativity make you lose your enthusiasm—or, as Robert DeNiro pronounces it in the baseball bat scene in
The Untouchables
(one of the greatest scenes in movie history) “En-two-siasm!” Know this: there will always be speed bumps on your road to fitness, and they will never go away, no matter how in shape you get. You will always find things you have to overcome. In fact, you’ll find that those obstacles will appear even more frequently as you continue on your path, and that they’ll crop up in the places you least expect.
Friends and family. The workplace. The old injury that rears its ugly head.
There will always be something that will try to unhinge your forward progress, and that brings us to a larger point.
Fitness is more a mental game than a physical one
.
When I try to motivate my clients, they often tell me that I don’t understand what they’re going through, that working out is difficult for them but easy for me because I’ve been doing it my whole life. The underlying point, I guess, is that I’m somehow immune to the kind of obstacles they face.
I’m not.
It’s not something I particularly love to talk about, but I haven’t held anything back from you yet and I’m not going to start now. Trust me, I have real skin in the game—a game that, for me, was literally life or death. Up till now, I’ve kept this stuff relatively private, but God hates a coward, right?
Settle in and let me tell you about it.
A hot girl named Jayne got me into cycling.
I was twenty-one years old and we were on a date at the Camellia Grill in uptown New Orleans. Over one of their spectacular chili-cheese omelets, I mentioned that the dryer at the laundromat must be broken because my jeans were shrinking. She smirked and told me that my jeans were fine, I was just getting fat. I, of course, knew that was impossible, because I’d always told myself that I’d never be one of those ex-football players who grew a gut. But the truth was in the numbers. After I finished playing college football, I was a ripped two hundred and forty pounds. Somehow that slim two-forty crept up to a jolly two-seventy in no time.
Jayne was right. I was getting fat.
That night, I checked myself out in the mirror and, sure enough, I saw a gut, plain as day. How had I missed it? I decided I needed to do something about it, so I went straight to Jayne for help. She was a pro at this. Jewish girls from Long Island basically invented dieting. Case in point, the woman who started Weight Watchers was a housewife from that area. Jayne was an expert on losing weight. I asked her how to do it.
“Well, there’s the Dexetrim and Tab diet,” she told me. “Or you could try the coke diet.”
“You just drink diet coke?” I asked.
“No, you diet by snorting coke.”
I decided to go with the Dexetrim and Tab diet. Seemed cheaper. So I went to the drug store and bought some of each. On my way home, I popped two pills (the box said to just take one but I’m a big guy) and I chased it down with a Tab. By the time I got home, I was a jittery, shaky mess. I called Jayne and told her I was about to crawl out of my skin.
“You’re only supposed to take one,” she said. “But don’t worry, you’ll get used to the jitters after a while.”
It turned out, that was the way I was supposed to feel on that diet. I decided I couldn’t live like that, so I went back to the store and bought every magazine that promised to tell how to lose ten pounds in ten minutes.
By the way, let me tell you something about them. Those articles are complete crap. In fact, if you look at a year’s worth of articles in the same fitness magazine, you’ll see how they contradict each other.
Here’s an example. Running magazines used to preach that you should buy thick-soled running shoes with lots and lots of cushion and stabilizers … until barefoot running came into fashion. Unfortunately, magazines survive on advertising and they can’t sell you bare feet. So the shoe companies started making “minimalist” shoes that they claimed were better than bare feet, which is kind of like beverage companies telling you that their drink quenches your thirst better than water. After that, those same magazines started writing articles preaching about how you should now buy lightweight running shoes.
Anyway, pretty soon it became clear that the magazine’s “professional” advice was bullshit. In fact, I was shocked to discover that they were just out and out lying. So with the Dexetrim and Tab diet shot and the magazines not working, I went back to my medical textbooks from college. Turned out that they had a really radical approach.
Eat sensibly and exercise.
Who would have thunk it?
At the time, I was careful with how I spent my money—mostly because I hardly had any. Like most Italians, I had a pizza budget. So I decided to kill two birds with one stone by taking my pizza money and using it to buy a bike, a maroon Fuji. From that point on, if I had to go anywhere, I rode there on the bike. In fact, to this day, when people tell me they don’t have time to exercise, I tell them to make their manner of conveyance their exercise. They’re usually surprised I know a word like “conveyance” and sometimes they even listen to me.
So that’s what got me into biking.
I wasn’t doing it as a sport yet, it was purely a way to lose weight. And it worked—but not exactly in the way I thought. Sure, the exercise from the bike helped me to drop pounds but, more importantly, the money I spent on the bike no longer went toward buying pizza, junk food and the rest of the sugary crap I’d been surviving on. Not only had I added aerobic exercise, I’d improved my diet.
My goal was to drop down to my usual weight of two-forty. After three months, I was surprised to find that I’d dropped even further. The scale said two-thirty. And it happened without me even noticing. I wasn’t consciously exercising or dieting. I was just riding around, living my life, eating properly for the first time and, next thing I knew, I was down to two-ten. Hell, I didn’t even realize I was at that weight until my clothes stopped fitting and I had to get my jeans taken in.
Even though losing weight was my initial goal, I ended up being a lot more interested in the bike, which I’d always previously thought of as a child’s toy. Riding around on it was oddly liberating. New Orleans had always been a tourist city and its streets were jammed with streetcars and tour buses. If I wanted to drive my car all the way from uptown, down to Cafe Du Monde in the French Quarter during the middle of the day, it would take an hour. But, on my bicycle, weaving in and out of traffic, I could whiz down, have a coffee and be back uptown in the same hour.
The only time I didn’t ride my bike was when I went to visit my parents in Donaldsonville—an eighty mile one-way trip through the swamp. For that, I always used to take my car. But one day, I decided to give it a shot on my bike. What the hell, right? How long could it take? The answer: three and a half hours. Unless you get dragged off the bike by a gator. Or pelted with beer cans by rednecks in a truck.
I’m not kidding.
Back then, hardly anyone had seen the tight European bike shorts that everyone wears now. And you know what area had really not seen them? The swamps of Louisiana. So when I rode to my parents wearing my lycra bike shorts, it was not uncommon for good old boys in their pick-up trucks to hurl bottles at me and call me a faggot. And you know what I was thinking when they were doing that?
Whew! At least they didn’t shoot me!
That, by the way, was when I started wearing a helmet. Helped defend against the beer bottles. You think I’m kidding.
So that’s how biking would have stayed for me—an enjoyable hobby and a great way to get around until, somewhere around the mid-eighties, I read about a guy named Pete Penseyres. He’d just done one of the most miraculous athletic feats on a bike that I’d ever heard about. Pete completed the RAAM (the Race Across America) in eight days, nine hours and forty-seven minutes with an average speed of 15.4 mph. That probably means nothing to you, but here’s how amazing it is: as I write this, that record still holds.
I became obsessed with RAAM. I had to know more about it. Who could do it? How did you sign up for it? Of course, in 1986 there was no Google, so information was almost impossible to come by—unless you wanted to go to a library, but those places are rarely dripping with hot chicks, so I stayed away. Instead, I grabbed every article I could find, sometimes ordering out-of-date magazines, even if they only had a word or two about Penseyre’s incredible feat.
Even more amazing than the actual time he spent crossing the continent was the amount of time he slept each day.
Less than ninety minutes every twenty-four hours. The rest of the time he was on that bike. It was his life. Back then, the longest I’d ever ridden in a single stretch was the eighty miles to my parent’s house. And when I finished that ride, I was always tired. So tired, in fact, that I’d sleep over at their place so that I didn’t have to tackle the return trip until after I’d gotten a full night’s rest.
During the RAAM, Pete Penseyres biked for over twenty-four hours straight. And he wasn’t even the only one doing it. Who are these guys, I thought? How is such a thing even humanly possible?
If they could do it, why not me?
It seemed like the only way to even have a shot at getting into that kind of shape was to take a year off and train night and day. Unfortunately, I wasn’t born with the last name Trump and P.E. teachers (which is how I earned my living at the time) don’t make anywhere near enough to just casually take a year off to train for something like that.
But I had to do something.
At the time, for extra money, I hosted a local radio show as well as had a stable of clients that I got paid to train. I was the only game in town. Life was good.
But it wasn’t great.
It rained a lot in Louisiana. And it was hot and humid. And there were no mountains to speak of—something that seemed critical if I was going to train really hard. But I knew of a place that didn’t have any of those problems. And I figured there was enough wealth there that I could pick up enough new clients to survive.
Los Angeles.
So I got in my Toyota Forerunner and started driving. Anything that didn’t fit, I left behind. I told myself I wasn’t going to stop until I arrived. I figured if Pete Penseyres could bike for twenty-four hours straight, I could certainly drive for that long. Also, I was afraid that if I stopped anywhere and spent the night, I would wake up remembering my cozy little life back in Louisiana, wonder what the hell I was doing, then turn around and drive home.
So I went straight through. The trip took thirty-five hours.
As I settled into my new life in Southern California, I began looking for super long distance ultra events to compete in. I started with a twelve-hour mountain bike race. Believe it or not, it was tough to find one that long. At the time, most races lasted only ninety minutes. The conventional wisdom was that significantly longer ones were too dangerous.
Didn’t matter. I was desperate to ride in it.
The problem was that it was only two months away—not a lot of time to get ready. But I knew if I missed this one, I’d have to wait a whole year before it was held again, which meant I had to figure out a way to ramp up my training regimen quickly. So I joined Bally’s and 24-Hour Fitness figuring that, no matter where I was, I could at least find a gym nearby stocked with lifecycles. Whenever I wasn’t with a client, I rode, even if it was only for an hour or two. Weekends were a different story. I pedaled my bike into the Santa Monica mountains for as long as I could manage. I worked up to twelve or thirteen hours at a stretch.
Finally, I was ready. Or at least I thought I was.
The race took place in Big Bear, CA in the San Bernadino mountains. As I drove to the event the day before the race, I realized that I had made a critical error. Big Bear’s elevation was over six thousand feet, but the race climbed into the mountains much higher. Even though I always acclimated well to altitude, I couldn’t do it overnight. I wasn’t prepared.
The race started at 7 a.m. on a cold, crisp August morning. I’d hoped that the heat would hold off until mid-afternoon, but it ended up getting dog hot by 9 a.m. Even though there were around one hundred people making the climb, most of them were in the tag-team competition. Only about twenty of us mutants were insane enough for the solo competition, trying to see how many laps up and down the mountain we could complete in twelve straight hours.
The uphills were steep and grueling but the downhills were even worse—a single track down loose shale rock. I got one good piece of advice before the race from a guy named Will. He and his brother, Owen, own Universal Cycles in L.A., my local bike shop. “Don’t use the brakes on the downhill,” he told me. “They are not your friend.”
He was mostly right. You can use the back brakes a little and you’ll only end up slipping and sliding—I learned that in the Santa Monica mountains, also known as the bunny slopes. Problem is, the back brakes don’t do much in the way of actually stopping you. Only the front brake can do that. Unfortunately, if you actually use the front brake, you’ll go head over handlebars quicker than you can think.
I learned that little trick on my first lap of the race.
Luckily, I had a good fall, meaning I was able to get back up and my bike was okay. Since we’re on the subject, would you like to know the secret to stopping on a steep downhill? Okay, here it is—don’t.
The race was brutal. It would have been tough for an experienced mountain biker on a pro bike, but I was a roadie on a borrowed bike who hadn’t given himself enough time to acclimate to the altitude and who didn’t have enough sense to avoid killing himself.
Around the seven-hour mark, I was exhausted, depleted and feeling flu-like symptoms. But, to me, this seemed like good news. Surely, this was how Pete Penseyres felt when he set his remarkable record, right? To be a true champion, you had to just push through the pain. Or so I thought.
I forced myself onward, not realizing that the reason I was exhausted was because I was only eating a single power bar every hour. It wasn’t nearly enough to fuel me. And the reason I was feeling flu-like was because I had completely sweated out my electrolytes without replenishing them. In short, I was starving and dehydrated.
Later, I would learn that the prevailing wisdom was that you needed to take in anywhere from two hundred and fifty to three hundred calories an hour to keep yourself fueled. That was based on the calorie in/calorie out concept, which demanded that you replenish the calories you were burning so you could keep going.