Training for Life

This week, last year, I was sitting next to my stepfather's hospital bed every day. We were still under the impression that he had an infection in his brain, and our fears remained assuaged. The official diagnosis of stage IV secondary brain cancer didn't arrive until after brain surgery, on July 4th of all days. I was quarantined on my couch after being freshly irradiated for my thyroid, and my parents kept the news to themselves until I was safe for human contact. Thus began the beginning of his end, so to speak, and a barrage of insufferable moments for my family.

The creation of this blog was not intended to showcase workouts. My intention was to get back into art making and use this place as a means to showcase works in progress, and inspiration. I wasn't able to drink alcohol, my diet was totally different, and I was about to enter into a completely different way of being. What happened was that I became the works in progress and the workouts became my inspiration, my antidepressant, my anchor to reality.

I talk a lot about these workouts being a microcosm of daily life. Once you make it through 15 minutes of heavy, hard breathing, heart pounding, white pain workouts, everything else in your life seems easy. I am not comparing a death in the family to working out, but I am drawing parallels between stressful situations. Our bodies don't care if it is death stress or financial stress or hard workout stress, its reaction to stress is the same. Most of the time we enter lock down. The curtains are drawn, we become immobile, and this is exactly the opposite of what needs to be done.

Just days after my stepfather passed away I was back in the gym. I could feel the depression rolling in like a storm, and I knew that the most important thing for me to do was to keep moving. I had to manually induce the happy chemicals. I had to manually release my endorphins. Three days a week I showed up to the workouts and gave all that had. Some days it was a fraction of the day before, but it was still everything I had. All of the sudden it was my responsibility to produce my own happiness from within because everything surrounding me was so damn sad. There wasn't anything that was going to take that pain away, time was going to have take care of it, and all I had to do was keep holding on until that was over.

I learned then that my autopilot is fucking amazing.

Recently, a new friend asked me what I was training for and the first thing that popped into my head was: Life. I didn't say that, just shrugged my shoulders and said something about "just for fun." However, training for life is exactly what I'm doing. It doesn't get more simple than that.