Iron Man

Not the comic or the subsequent movies or even the race (though that relates), Iron Man as I say it is the other side of my cross training.

In this case, I am into phase three of this project: weight training.

Let me start from the beginning.

It all started with a trip to the cabin. Those annual summer trips where me and the guys fish and goof off in the woods. As a part of that, we are always building stuff. Often what we are working on is related to life at the cabin- paneling, building a dock, fixing boats, etc.- and I try to document what we are up to. I rarely look at the photos after we get back (at least not more than once) but I was showing my coworkers and I saw... me.

I was cutting paneling with a chainsaw, which is one of the most manly and almost stupid things you can do, but what caught my eye was my physique. It looked horrible...I looked horrible. It got me wondering.

How could a guy who ran thirteen races and often cycles more than one hundred  miles a week look like that? I'm strong and capable and athletic, but I look like a guy who plays competitive xbox. What gives?

Well, the answer is not simple. It's not an exercise thing or a diet thing or a training thing: it's all of those things. I might be above average in activity, but I am below average in diet. I trained myself to eat once a day. I drank a six-pack a day. I barely train. And I look like it.

So, I talked to my friend Meers and my friend Teddy and I got some hard but solid info: you have to work for it if you want it. That is the birth of the Iron Man Project.

It's named for the race because if you can compete in an iron man, you are the pinnacle of fitness. It's a two mile swim followed by a hundred mile cycle ride followed by a marathon. It's not easy to do any of those things, let alone in succession. To do it, you would have to train and focus your energy into becoming the most you could become. And that, is my goal.

I take a holistic view of life. I believe that every time someone says, "I have no life," or, "I have a life outside of this place," they are wrong. You have time between when you are born and when you die. That is all. You have a life, and it is measured by every moment between those two events. Look at a headstone in a cemetery, and you will always see two numbers with a dash in the middle. That dash is your life. It doesn't get divided into work and play and sport and hobby. It is complete: whatever you do is your life. I determined I am going to design my life.

A word of caution: this will make many people think you are an asshole.

You see, if I don't like someone, I don't spend time with them. I could. It's not about "could." It is about "will." And I won't. Recently I burned a bridge. I don't regret it though it makes me sad. I will genuinely miss that person, but I would not spend any more time dealing with a problem that she could have fixed on her own. It may seem hard or unfair to do that- to swear someone off over a problem that could be fixed- but I can't spend my time- my life- waiting for someone else to make a decision. It hurts to do so, but I had to ask myself if this is the way I wanted to live. The answer is,"no," so the only option is to go the other way. You can hold on for a long time- years, a lifetime, forever- but when it's just a dream and no action, it's a losing game. As they say, "A vision without a plan is a hallucination."

And so are all things.

My boats are hard to do. But that is no reason to shy away. It is a reason to work harder.

A relationship is work. Why run from it?

To develop the body which will do all I ask and look as I wish, I will have to work.

It's all the same thing: work, dedication, discipline. And I find joy in it.

When we tell our children to believe in themselves and that they should live their dreams, we do them a disservice if we neglect to add the work involved. All we really have is opportunity to work for what we want. As the Preacher says, everything else is, "...vanity and a striving after wind."

Let us proceed.