FITNESS CONFIDENTIAL (16 page)

They believed a person at that altitude without bottled air would die from lack of oxygen, that there was a barrier a thousand feet below the summit beyond which humans couldn’t survive. That is, until Reinhold Messner did it in 1978. Today, an Everest summit without supplemental oxygen is done on a regular basis. And the only reason that this record will never be broken is because there’s no summit on Earth higher than Everest.

Reinhold Messner redefined the limits of what people thought the human body could endure. We have, as a species, done this over and over. Why?

Because we are not weak.

We are strong.

But you wouldn’t know it by looking around. The reason? We’ve become civilized.

Look at our boxers. The best of them have always been immigrants—the poor, the working class. These people had nothing to lose. They were literally fighting for their dinner. They’re the ones who had to claw and scrape their way to the top. But, almost to a person, once they achieved fame and money, they lost their edge. Or, as Mick tells Rocky in
Rocky 3
, “Three years ago you were supernatural. You was hard and nasty. You had this cast iron jaw. But then the worst thing happened to you that could happen to any fighter. You got civilized!”

So am I saying getting civilized is bad? Absolutely not. I don’t want those e-mails. I got enough coming with this damn book already. I’m just using it as a metaphor to describe what happens to us when things get too easy.

We’re not weak. We make ourselves weak.

How?

By eating crap we know will make us fat.

By lying on the couch, watching TV instead of moving.

By telling ourselves and our kids that “everyone is a winner” which makes us complacent and removes our natural drive to succeed.

I’m going to say it again. We are not weak—we’ve just allowed the world to make us that way.

We are strong.

I want to tell you about the worst client I ever had. This guy was in bad shape. Thin arms, big belly. He was a good thirty-five pounds overweight. Let’s call him Dean, because that’s his name. He’s also my co-author on this book—but this was a while ago.

Dean hired me to help him get into shape. He wanted to drop the weight and put on a little muscle. I did my best. I swear.

But this guy was impossible.

He hated working out more than anyone I have ever known. He did the usual things—cancel appointments, feign illness. And, when he did show up, he would try to get me to bullshit about movies and politics in the hopes that I’d forget to tell him to actually, you know, lift some weights or do a couple jump ropes.

But I was onto him.

I made him do that stuff anyway. What I couldn’t make him do was eat right. Not that I didn’t try. In fact, I took him on an eye-opening tour through his refrigerator and pantry and told him that even fat Elvis, during the rhinestone-studded onesie years, ate healthier than he did. Dean nodded and agreed and then completely ignored me.

In fact, he won’t admit it, but I think he was actually glad when I got cancer, because it meant he didn’t have to work out for a while.

But I kept at him.

I decided I was not going to give up on this guy. I was going to get him in shape and get him healthy no matter what it took. I gave it my all.

Which he rewarded by firing me.

Truth be told, I was glad. He’d worn me down. But I was also kind of sad because I really liked hanging out with the guy. I figured I’d never see him again, which is why it was such a surprise when he called me the following week and asked if I wanted to grab dinner and drink some beers at King’s Fish House. Not only had he given up on getting into shape, he was trying to drag me down with him. But I missed the bald bastard so I showed up.

We became friends.

I didn’t want to lose the friendship by urging him into fitness, but after a while I noticed that he started to lose a little weight. I mentioned it, but didn’t push it any further. Then I noticed him keeping an eye on what I ordered at dinner—usually a piece of fish and some vegetables. He started to do the same. I told him about No Sugar, No Grains.

The weight kept dropping off.

Eventually, there came a day when he asked, very casually, if there were any exercises he might consider doing, “You know, easy ones that don’t take much effort.”

Sure, I told him. How about walking? Everyone can do that. It’s easy and fun.

He started walking, short distances at first. Then, over time, he’d add on a mile here and there. He told me he was enjoying it. He would have just kept taking his long walks but, one day, he realized he was going to be late for a meeting, so he jogged the rest of the way home.

And he liked it.

So he started jogging a little more. I complimented him on his continued weight loss and improved fitness. He thanked me and then asked another question, again very casually.

“How would I go about putting on some muscle without any pain or effort?”

Everything with this guy required “no pain or effort.”

I shrugged and told him about the handful of exercises that give you the most bang for your buck—the ones I told you about in a previous chapter. In fact, I even showed him how to do them.

He nodded, said thanks and didn’t mention it again.

Over the next few months, I began to see some results on him and I suggested, very nonchalantly, that, since he was running so much now, he might consider running a 10K or a half-marathon, which is just over thirteen miles. The Malibu Marathon was coming up in a couple months. Why not give it a shot?

He said no. He thought it sounded too difficult.

“Isn’t there some kind of training program you need to go through first to be able to do something like that?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Those programs were created for people trying to get faster. You just need to run more. I can show you how to do that safely.”

So he started running a little more, building up his aerobic base. Eventually, it was the day of the marathon. When he showed up, I realized he didn’t have anything in the way of gear. Hell, he didn’t even have an appropriate shirt to wear.

I gave him one of mine.

I also asked my girlfriend, Serena, to run along with him to help him keep a steady pace so he didn’t burn out. As an avid marathoner, she happily agreed because she could run a half with her eyes closed.

When we got to the race, I was shocked to see how attractive all the runners were. Then I realized we were in Malibu. Figures.

So the race began. It followed a beautiful route that wound its way along the Pacific coastline. A couple hours later, Dean crossed the finish line, which also marked his crossing over from being a couch potato to being an athlete.

Let’s recap what happened here.

He was never an athlete in school. He’d never laced up a pair of running shoes for a 5k or 10k. His job as a TV writer meant that he spent most of his day sitting at a table with a bunch of other writers, trying to avoid the candy jar. He’d started out on this adventure a good thirty pounds overweight and had very little muscle tone. Even worse, he thought of himself as weak.

A few months later, he’d finished a half-marathon with a very respectable time.

If you want to see what he’s up to, check him out at
www.deanlorey.com
. He writes about stuff he worked on, like
Arrested Development
and the
Nightmare Academy
book series, as well as his road to fitness. As I said, Dean was my worst client, and I’ve had some pretty bad ones, trust me. If he can turn it around, so can you. Hell, so can anyone. So let me say it one more time.

We all face obstacles in life. I faced a big one. But we are not weak.

We are strong.

Part Four

CUT THE CRAP

Chapter Twenty

TIME TO TAKE THE TRASH OUT

I walked into my local Starbucks and ran into an old buddy of mine, comedian John Mendoza. You’d recognize him. He has a face like a catcher’s mitt.

“How’s your finger?” he asked.

“It’s fine,” I said, a little confused.

“You better never lose that thing, ‘cause your career would be over.”

“Really? Why?”

He smiled. “Because all you do is point.”

He demonstrated with a pretty good impression of me. I knew exactly what he was talking about. When I train people, I use a lot of pointing and hand gestures to show them what exercise to do next. Speaking with your hands is an Italian thing. I can only speak one language with my mouth, but my hands are multi-lingual.

Besides, I’m usually in the middle of telling a story that’s totally unrelated to fitness and I hate to interrupt myself when I’m talking.

There’s a method to that madness. I’ll go out of my way to chat about anything other than the task at hand because I want to take my client’s minds off the discomfort and repetition of the exercise. Ever see those TV trainers that yell and count and pretend they’re drill sergeants?

“Come on, you can do it! Give me five more! Breathe! Feel the buuuuurn!”

What’s up with those assholes? You know why they do that? Because they’ve seen other trainers do it, so they think they should. They’re perpetuating a stereotype that should have been put out to pasture along with VCRs, phone booths and Tony Little’s pony tail. When you’re exercising, you’re going to get the same amount of benefit whether you’re enjoying yourself or not, so I figure why not make it fun? Or, as I tell my clients:

Your body doesn’t mind if your brain’s having a good time
.

It’s like when I go to the dentist. When he’s drilling my teeth, there’s usually a certain amount of pain involved. You know what he’s doing while I’m in pain? He’s talking. About anything. The weather, what movies he’s seen, sports. Any kind of bullshit he can think of to take my mind off the pain.

You know what he’s not doing? Getting in my face and yelling, “Feel the pain, Vinnie! Listen to the sound of my high-speed drill as it cuts into your teeth! Smell your enamel buuuurn!”

Speaking of dentists, while one of my clients was doing bench presses, I told him this story.

“I was talking to my dentist,” I said, “and I asked him what’s the weirdest thing he ever pulled out of someone’s gums. You know what he told me? ‘There’s never any shortage of pubic hair in there.’”

I’ll talk to my clients about anything to make the workout more fun. Far as I’m concerned, absolutely nothing is off limits. Like this little gem I shared with another client of mine.

“I have a third ball,” I told him while he was on the elliptical. “You think I’m kidding? I really do. I have three. I hear most guys only have two.” Then I went on to explain that it’s not technically an authentic testicle—it’s really a fibrous growth that appeared after the chemo. “After I discovered it wasn’t cancerous,” I continued, “a surgeon wanted to remove it but I told the guy, ‘Are you kidding? Makes me unique. A third nut may not put me in a class by myself but it can’t take that long to call role.’”

There’s no reason a workout shouldn’t be fun. A good trainer should help make it that way, and the best ones are truly on your side. They’re your buddy, your partner in crime. The way you look should be even more important to them than the way they look.

Remember Mick from
Rocky
? He was Rocky’s trainer. Mick wasn’t winning any beauty pageants. Hell, he’d lose to Mendoza. But Mick cared about Rocky and they were on his journey together. Why is that important?

Because there’s strength in numbers.

That’s why people join running and cycling clubs. These aren’t things you do with a partner. No one can run for you. No one can pedal for you. But people join these organizations because they want support. Because it’s more fun. Because there’s strength in numbers.

In 1962, JFK gave a speech at Rice University where he talked about the goal of sending a man to the moon. The big question was why. Not only was it going to be expensive, it was going to be incredibly difficult, if not impossible. JFK had an answer. He said that we choose to do these things “not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

That’s an elegant way of saying “cut the crap.”

We do things that are worthwhile, not because they’re easy, but because they’re hard. Let me give you an example.

I want to tell you about a client of mine. Caroline. You’d like her. There’s a lot of loud-mouthed, New York Italian lady stuffed into her compact four-eleven frame. She’s funny. With that accent, if you were talking to her on the phone, you’d swear she was Bugs Bunny’s sister. She uses the F-word as a noun, verb and adjective. She may only weigh a hundred pounds, but ninety of that is heart. She’s run over twenty marathons, including Boston, and recently completed the Ironman triathlon—all while holding down a full-time job.

She is, to put it mildly, a badass.

She also has Lupus, an auto-immune disease that causes a person’s immune system to attack the healthy tissues in their body. The list of complications from this disease is too long and scary to mention. There is no cure. But, in spite of all that, she works harder than anyone I know. I often see her in the pre-dawn hours on the street, getting her run in.

Caroline cut the crap. She did it not because it was easy, but because it was hard.

What about Amy Dodson? Have you ever heard of her? If not, you should have. She’s an elementary school teacher in Arizona who discovered that she loved to run. She began with local 5Ks and 10Ks, then moved up to ten-milers, half-marathons and, finally, marathons.

But she didn’t stop there.

Next came the triathlon, where she won two national and two world championships. After that, she completed a couple Ironmans, followed by a 50K race in Toronto, which led to four fifty-mile runs, which qualified her for the Western States 100 Endurance Run, maybe the toughest trail race out there. Just accomplishing all of this, while holding down a full-time job, is an incredible feat. But what if I told you she did it without one of her legs?

And then what if I told you that that wasn’t even the tough part.

She also did it with only one lung.

At the age of nineteen, Amy had her left leg amputated and her lung removed to save her from cancer. It worked. I first met her in the scorching July heat of Death Valley where she was pacing a competitor in the one hundred and thirty five mile Badwater race. She was so fun, vivacious and positive that it honestly took me a long time to realize she was missing a leg.

Do me a favor. Google her. See if you can find a picture where she’s not smiling.

Amy Dodson cut the crap. She did it not because it was easy, but because it was hard.

Let me ask the question you’re probably thinking. Why do people do these crazy things—triathlons, ultra sports where the distances are too insane for most people to comprehend, climbing mountains so high that you have to bring your own oxygen? Is it because they pay well?

Nope.

In fact they cost money. Lots of money, particularly when you’re talking about something like a mountain climbing expedition to Nepal, where the price of entry is in the tens of thousands of dollars. Same for RAAM, the Race Across America. Some people say it can be done for twenty thousand. Everyone I know that’s done it has spent at least thirty. And that’s just for the race. Forget about the cost of training.

So if it doesn’t pay well, there must be some other tangible benefit to doing this stuff, right? Does it help you career wise?

Nope.

Just the opposite. Not only does it require a large financial investment, it requires a large time investment. Just training for these things can easily take twenty-five or more hours a week for months on end. Time that could be spent advancing your career.

How about helping in your relationships with friends and family?

Nope.

Hell, I’ve lost relationships over this sport. Friendships, girlfriends. There are just not enough hours in the day to work, train and also put in the time that relationships require. I can’t tell you how many girlfriends have told me, “You’re more in love with that bike than me.”

It’s hard to argue. I do love my bike.

Riding is my passion and I’ve always looked for someone to share it, not change it. In fact, it wasn’t until I met Serena that I found a relationship that worked. She’s not even a cyclist, she’s a runner—but passion is passion.

It’s hard to find someone like that. I got lucky.

I remember, years ago, an eighteen-year old kid came up to me before an ultra cycling race I was competing in. He said he wanted to be an ultra cyclist and asked me how much weight he could lose without sacrificing power. I asked him if he had a girlfriend. He said he did. I asked him how much she weighed.

“About a hundred and twenty,” he said.

“That’s the first weight you’re going to have to lose.”

Funny thing is, I really meant it at the time. I guess I was a little cynical back then.

So, if these crazy events don’t benefit your finances, career or relationships, why do people do them? I have three answers for you. Here’s the first one.

Why do people do these things?

Answer: why not?

Remember what Rocky said after Adrian asked him, “Why do you wanna fight?” He replied, “Because I can’t sing or dance.”

Look, I don’t mean to trivialize the question, but why do you assume people have a choice? Some of us just can’t sing or dance. Not only that, I could name a lot of other pursuits that people spend time and money on that don’t benefit them financially, career-wise or in their relationships.

Some people love fantasy football. Some people love to collect stamps. Some people play video games. You could probably name a hundred more.

None of these things benefit people in a practical way, and yet people do them because they like to. Because they can’t sing or dance. Because it’s the key that fits their particular lock. The truth is, you’ll never know if it’s your key until you try it. Who knows? It may unlock a door in you that you never even knew could be opened.

So that’s the first reason why people enjoy doing these insane events. Here’s the second.

The problem with life is that it’s not a game.

We love games! Board games, card games, video games. They’re fun. They have levels, goals, winners and losers. Many of them even have a finish line. But life has none of those things, except maybe a finish line but the finish line is death and that’s no fun.

Hell, the Scientologists even created a religion around turning life into a game, a science-fiction one, with levels and fancy sci-fi equipment and even space aliens you have to defeat. I think they’re nuts but what do I know? A lot of people seem to like them. They even own an entire town in Florida and I’m still working on getting a couch.

Point is, even though we know life isn’t a game, we try to make it one. We give ourselves arbitrary goals to get momentary satisfaction. A better car, a raise, a nicer house. The problem with all those things is that your happiness is tied to something unworthy. Money. In fact, that’s how I decide whether or not to buy something. I try to put a dollar price on the happiness. If I look at a new computer that costs a thousand bucks, I think to myself, will it make me a thousand bucks happier?

If the answer is “no,” and it usually is, I pass.

So that’s the second reason people love these kinds of events. They put clear rules, goals and objectives over something as muddy as life. They give us a way to win that relies on our own ability, determination and willpower.

But there’s one more reason I love these competitions, even though they don’t help you financially, career-wise or in your relationships.

I don’t love them in spite of those things.

I love them because of those things.

Taking the money out of the equation keeps it pure. It’s just you and the sport.

As far as career goes, I guess it does have some impact on my career but I’ve never gained a client because I competed in ultras, although I’ve gained them because of the special knowledge my personal experience brings.

And, as for relationships, the truth is I don’t want a relationship with someone who doesn’t understand this passion. It separates the wheat from the chaff.

It may sound crazy, but it’s like in
Rocky 3
when Mick asks Rocky, “Does anything normal go through your head?” and Rocky answers, “Nothing that I remember.” What’s weird to the other guy is normal to me. And maybe it’s normal for you, too, and you just don’t know it yet.

Who knows, maybe you can’t sing or dance either.

But Vinnie, you’re probably thinking, what you’re asking is impossible. If cutting the crap means I have to run an ironman competition or become some kind of ultra runner, forget it! There’s no way I’m ever going to be able to do that stuff!

I understand your hesitation, but first I’d like to remind you that Caroline finished an Ironman triathlon with lupus and Amy became a national and world champion while missing about a half a body. They did it. You want to tell me again that you can’t?

Truth is, I’m not even asking you to do what they did, although I’d love it if you gave it a shot, because this isn’t about amazing accomplishments. It’s about the everyday accomplishments. It’s about doing something not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard.

When I started riding a bike through New Orleans instead of using a car … that was me cutting the crap.

When I bought the bike with pizza money and forced myself to start eating better food … that was me cutting the crap.

The first time you pass on a jelly doughnut or take the stairs instead of the elevator or sign up for a local dance class, that’s you cutting the crap. And you should give yourself credit. All those books and videos out there want to make money by selling you on the idea that you can get the body you want with no effort, that you can get something for nothing.