FITNESS CONFIDENTIAL (17 page)

You know what that does?

It makes you quit in frustration because you don’t see the results they promise. And if you do stick with it and start seeing results, it makes your hard work seem like nothing. It minimizes your accomplishment, because these things are not easy. They are hard. But when you do them, that’s you cutting the crap. Being out there every day, trying your best—that’s the most important thing. And you know what’s going to happen when you do that?

You’re going to fail.

Look, everyone cares about IQ but I care about FQ—Failure Quotient. Failure is good. Failure is necessary. Failure means you’re in the game! If you’ve never failed, you’ve never played. Look at it this way. Times are tough out there right now and a lot of people are looking for work. Chances are, you’re going to go on a lot of job interviews and you’re going to hear “no” a lot. Doesn’t matter. You only need to hear one “yes.”

Want to know how many times I’ve failed?

I’d need another book just to skim the surface, but I’ll tell you about one time in particular. Remember that actress I told you about in the opening of the book, the one where her people promised to pay me ten grand if I could take thirty-five pounds off her? I did it. It turned out that the actress was so heavy that the thirty-five pounds flew off.

She was thrilled, as you might imagine. I knew the Hollywood types were going to be thrilled, as well. Which is why it was such a shock when her managers and the studio called me back into the conference room.

“You did a wonderful job,” they said. “Her body looks great. But we have a problem.”

They all glanced at each other nervously. No one wanted to be the one to say what this problem was. Must be a hell of a problem, I thought.

Finally, they laid their cards on the table. “It’s her face. Can you make her lose more weight in her face?”

I stared at them. Had I heard right? “She just has a round face,” I said, finally. “That’s just the way her face is.”

They all looked away. Suddenly, their shoes and the ceiling became the most interesting things on the planet. “Right,” they continued. “We completely understand.”

Good, I thought. Finally.

“But can you get her to lose some weight in her face?” they pressed. “In the screen test, it’s still coming off too fat.”

I felt like I was in a Fellini film. So, futilely, I tried to explain to them how weight loss works, that you can’t just lose weight in a particular area. I also explained that you can’t change a person’s basic biology. You can’t make a short guy tall just by working out. They nodded and didn’t care. They wanted more weight to come off.

The actress and I had worked hard and done everything they wanted us to do and it still wasn’t enough for these Hollywood types.

By the time her show was cancelled, she’d gained all the weight back.

Why? Because she was doing it for all the wrong reasons … and so was I. I wanted to look like a hero and save the day, not to mention make some bucks, so I went against my principles and got her weight off quickly. But I taught her nothing. She did what I asked her to do, but I didn’t give her any knowledge or resources. I didn’t support her.

I consider that whole episode a failure.

But I learned something. It’s not enough to help people. You have to show them how to help themselves because you won’t always be there. Even more important, for fitness to work long term, the client has to want it for the right reasons.

Look at Dean, my co-author. I worked out with him for months and he barely improved because he wasn’t ready. He didn’t want it. It wasn’t until years later, when he returned to working out, that he finally saw big results. Nothing had changed. He was still the same guy, but the difference was that he wanted it then. He was ready.

The problem right now is that not enough people are ready. When I look at the world today, I see the same thing happening to fitness that’s happening to the economy. In fact, I call it:

The economy of fitness
.

Just like we’ve lost the economic middle class in the country, we’ve lost the middle class of fit people. We’re left with only couch potatoes and ultra athletes. It wasn’t always that way. Back in the sixties, only 13 percent of Americans were considered obese. By 2005, that increased to 35 percent. And that’s just obesity. If you look at the statistics for Americans who are currently at a weight that’s considered “unhealthy,” the number skyrockets to over two thirds of the country.

Two thirds. That’s the middle class that we’ve lost. I want to bring them back.

How? Simple. Stay away from sugars and grains. Exercise. Cut the crap.

At the beginning of this thing, I told you that I was your personal trainer and I am. There’s strength in numbers. With you and me, that’s two. That’s a good start. But it’s just that, a start. Join a gym, a cycling club, a hiking group. Find other people out there looking to do the same thing. You see all those old people walking around malls in the morning before the stores open? Go walk with them. They could use some company.

And don’t let the bad stuff that everyone else is eating throw you off your game. Next time you go out to a restaurant and they bring some bread to the table, cut the crap! Tell them to take it away. You don’t eat it at home before dinner so why should you eat it when you go out?

And don’t let those bums selling worthless fitness gear and useless supplements con you into wasting your hard earned cash. Tell them to go screw themselves. Tell them to cut the crap.

And next time you see a celebrity on TV telling you to try Jenny or Weight Watchers or any of the other pre-packaged diet-food factories, keep in mind you’ve already tried them. You hated them then and you’re going to hate them now.

I want to tell you one more story before we go.

You know who Joe Dean is? He’s one of the greatest men that ever lived. He started off as the sales director for Converse tennis shoes, then he became the athletic director for LSU and turned the sports program into what it is today. More importantly, he was a mentor to me when I was a teenager. He had many stories, but this was the one that’s gotten me through life so far.

“Vinnie,” he said, “you ever go to throw away a soda can, and when you open the trash you see it’s full, so you try to teeter the can on top and close the lid so it’s someone else’s problem?”

“Sure, Mr. Dean,” I told him. “I’ve done that.”

“Next time you see that,” he said, “I want you to do something completely different. Don’t wait for your parents to tell you to empty it. Take the initiative and do it yourself.” He ended by saying, “In life, whenever the trash can is full, don’t wait for someone else to deal with it. Just take it out.”

We’ve been neglecting ourselves for too long. For most of our lives, we’ve delayed getting the kind of healthy body and active life we want and deserve.

The trash can is now full, folks.

Let’s take it out.

LAGNIAPPE

Book’s over. You can stop reading right now and tell your friends you finished and no one would call you a liar. But, like I said a while back, I’m from Louisiana and we have this thing called lagniappe, meaning a little something extra, which is what I’m going to give you right now.

Before I knew if my cancer was in remission, I’d started training again. My thinking was that if the leukemia was gone, then I’d already have a solid jump on preparing for the Furnace Creek 508. But if I wasn’t in remission, then I figured it couldn’t hurt to get into better physical and mental shape before my next round of chemo. Either way, I didn’t see any reason not to train.

So, by the time I got the all clear from the doctor, I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I’d already laid down three thousand miles on the bike. My aerobic base was solid. The problem was that, between the chemo and the cancer, I’d lost a ton of muscle mass. Plus, I didn’t have an ounce of fat on me and I was going to need some in order to fuel my body during the intense training ahead.

This put me in a bizarre position.

Usually, I’m helping people lose fat, not put it on, so I became a living example of “do what I say, not what I do.” I started eating at least a pint of Ben and Jerry’s a night (Chunky Monkey was a favorite) along with tons of pasta. Sugar and grains pack on those pounds, right?

Because I wasn’t used to the intense sugar spikes that were always followed by a crash, I started dumping heavy cream onto my Chunky Monkey. I know what you’re thinking, that’s like taking sand to the beach. But here’s why it helped. Fat, which heavy cream is full of, slows your body’s absorption of carbs, which helps prevent those terrible spikes.

Over the next six months, I trained relentlessly.

By September, I had logged over twelve thousand miles on the bike. As for putting on muscle and fat, it was a struggle. My body was so depleted by the end of the chemo that I couldn’t overcome the massive amount of calories I was burning during training. I wasn’t concerned about this, because I was still foolishly using sugar and grains as my primary fuel. Old habits die hard. The food I ate during the race was going to have to get me to the finish line, but because I wasn’t yet following a “No Sugar/No Grains” lifestyle, I hoped it would be enough.

This turned out to be a critical error … but I would only learn that during the race. The hard way.

The race began in the parking lot of the Hilton Garden Inn in Santa Clarita, a nice but modest hotel surrounded by California palms. It shared a parking lot with a Marie Calendar’s restaurant and was within walking distance of Six Flags Magic Mountain theme park. In other words, if you were in the mood for a slice of pie or a roller coaster ride, this was the place to be. But pie and roller coasters were not on my mind.

Failure was.

The other racers waited at the starting line under the hotel’s overhang, listening to Chris Kostman, the race director, as he gave final instructions. When he was done, he played the National Anthem on a boombox, amplified by his bullhorn.

I was nowhere near there.

I was back in the parking lot by my rented, white Toyota van, joking with my crew, trying to take my mind off things. I didn’t want to be buried in the pack, waiting for the race to start. The nervous energy of other competitors was infectious and I had plenty of nerves already without any help from them.

Not only had I DNFd (Did Not Finish) the last time I’d run this race, there was something else weighing on my mind. Something even worse. A couple months earlier, as a test to see if my body could handle this kind of distance, I’d competed in the Race Across Oregon, or RAO. It’s a five hundred thirty-five mile trek through the mountains of Oregon with forty thousand feet of elevation gain. It’s grueling. Not as tough as the Furnace Creek 508, with its ripping wind, dry desert heat and freezing night-time cold, but it’s close.

I’d hoped to have a strong finish in the RAO to give me confidence heading into the 508, but I ended up DNFing after four hundred miles. The problem was my stomach. After only a hundred miles it began to bother me. Have you ever had too much to eat and felt that, if you ate even one more bite, you’d puke? That’s the way this felt, but I didn’t have anything in my stomach. I grew so nauseated that I couldn’t even keep down water. I tried drinking some Pellegrino (“Italian water for an Italian stomach!”) because, in the past, the bubbles had helped soothe my nausea, but not even that worked.

At the three-hundred-thirty mile mark, an EMT team visited me on the course and determined that I was severely dehydrated and should quit the race and get immediate medical attention. I refused, against their advice and the wishes of my crew, preferring to push on and try to finish. I literally willed my body to the four-hundred mile mark, but by then, I was in serious trouble.

I was so dehydrated that my muscles were seizing. The spasms were agonizing. I’d also become disoriented and could no longer even pedal in a straight line. My crew, consisting of Mehran (my crew chief from my prior 508 attempt), David Holt (a veteran of the sport who I’d crewed for at a previous 508) and my new girlfriend, Serena (who I was hoping to impress), finally said “no more.” I had no fight left in me to argue. I was done.

The Race Across Oregon was supposed to give me confidence for the Furnace Creek 508, but instead, I had DNFd and in spectacular fashion.

That’s what I was thinking about as I waited for the 508 to begin. Would my stomach hold up? What about my knee, the one that had crapped out on me the last time I was here? I was also coming off two DNFs in a row. I wasn’t used to failure, but failure was becoming my norm. My body was the one thing I could always count on, even when other things were bad. It had always been strong. But after the leukemia and the chemo, my confidence was shaken.

Over the loudspeaker, I heard Chris Kostman begin the countdown to the start of the race. “Ten … nine … eight …”

I mounted my bike and pedaled over to the pack.

“seven … six … five … four …”

Calm down, I told myself. Just relax. Cut the crap.

“three … two … one!”

I took a breath and pushed down on my pedal as all the competitors surged forward.