abeachparty’s BodyBlog

I am crazy for doing this, but I am going to enter a bodybuilding contest.  I think.  It is the NPC Natural Michigan contest, which is to be held in mid-July of 2008.  Nothing seems to motivate me  more than fear of looking bad on stage.

I will check out another (Novice Michigan) contest in March, to see the level of competition I’ll be facing in the Masters division.  Actually, since my birthday is at the beginning of July, I can enter the Grand Masters (50 years old and older) division.

So, here I go.  Hopefully, I make some decent gains before then.

Yours truly,
Paul

I used to run quite a few "fun run" races, mostly 5K and 10K in distance.  I try to keep all my old race numbers in a file folder, with the times I ran and the dates on them.  I’m sure there are a few missing, but I still found between 20 and 25 of them.

My running times over the years.

The earliest one I found was a 5K from May, 1989, when I ran 25:03.

My best 5K was in Riverside, California in March of 1990:  22:32.

After that, I quit running 5Ks for a while and ran 10K races.  Best 10K race I can find was later in 1990, with at time of 47:28.

I found the race number from a 10 Mile race (78:34) sponsored by a winery in Santa Barbara.  I remember that they had wine and cheese for us runners afterward.

After leaving California in 1991, things went downhill pretty quickly.  Later that year, in Texas, I ran a 5K in around 26 minutes.  By 1995, in Michigan, I had slowed down to 28:15  However, I had my ups and downs.  The last 5K I ran was in October, 1997, 10 years ago.  That was a fast, flat track, and I ran it in 25:45.

So, Saturday, I ran my first 5K race in 10 years.  My goal was to beat 30:00, which I was able to accomplish.  I was pretty pleased with my time of 28:39.  My son took some video of it (just a bit of clowning before the start, and then about the last minute of the thing):

YouTube video taken by my son.

I was pretty sore Monday and Tuesday, tibialis anterior, mostly!  Also, they keep the results of these races on the Internet virtually forever.  

So, finishing dead last in my age category is kind embarrassing!

I used to have this idea firmly in my mind, once upon a time.  Then, it seems I forgot it.  Now, it is coming back to me.

You have all heard the saying, beauty is skin deep.  But, when that beauty is created or enhanced through the painstaking task of bodybuilding, I would say that it usually runs deeper.  In fact, I would venture to say that the majority of the transformation occurs not at the physical or visible level, but invisibly and spiritually.

Bodybuilding is not easy, and I think that God made it that way on purpose.  There are valuable inner traits that can only be gotten if a task is hard, and without immediate rewards.  For example, if we could all gain half an inch per week in all the places where we desire to gain body size, and lose half an inch in all the places we wish to lose it, we would never develop that certain attribute that bodybuilders all get, and which can be called faith or steadfastness.  Because to make progress in bodybuilding, you necessarily must go through a lot of periods when you continue to do the right thing with virtually no visible results.  And that is such a valuable skill for all the rest of life, the parts of life that happen outside the gym.

These days, when I see a great physique, I begin to think of the inner transformation that must have occurred in that individual in order for the body to have been transformed.  The body is only the tip of the iceberg.  The big transformations happen in the soul.

Back in college, some of the Christians I hung out with used to be fond of a certain saying, phrased as a hypothetical question:

If Christianity was declared illegal, would there be enough evidence to convict you?

That is, could people find enough things I’d said or written, or things I’d done, to bring "charges" against me?  Over the years, I have sometimes reworked this little saying to suit my bodybuilding attempts:

If bodybuilding was declared illegal, would there be enough evidence to convict me?

I sometimes have had to say:  No, probably not.  I could at best be convicted of Attempted Bodybuilding.  Of course, I am once again back to working on changing that.  And the best evidence is how people react to the image I present.  I would hazard a guess that no one at my work would imagine that I even have aspirations to be a bodybuilder.  Part of it is just that in the sort of clothing people wear in my office, you wouldn’t necessarily recognize a bodybuilder.  But that other part … the fact that there is nothing, really, yet to flaunt … THAT’S the part I’m working on.

Let there be enough evidence to convict!

In some ways, it is a great thing to walk around every day with the I’m a bodybuilder tape looping in my mind.  For example, it keeps me away from junk food at the Social Hour after church.  One time, the Rector preached a slam-dunk sermon on the 7 Deadly Sins, in which the sin of Gluttony was featured.  Then, the entire congregation marched downstairs to Social Hour, to a table filled with Krispy Kreme doughnuts, 2 chocolate cakes, about 10 kinds of cookies, and … well, you get the idea.  The sermon was soon forgotten.

But, I escaped the trap, because in my mind, the words:  Don’t touch that stuff - you’re a bodybuilder! were admonishing me to wait for something better.  Which I did.

But, there is a way in which I’ve discovered that this mental tape loop has not been healthy for me.  It has allowed me to become lazy, to think of myself as a bodybuilder even when I neglect the most basic thing about being a bodybuilder:  working out!  Having this mantra ringing in the ears of my soul allows me to feel as if I’ve added to my physical strength and glory if I’ve:  (1) simply picked up a BB magazine; (2) eaten a protein bar; (3) read one of Dave Draper’s newsletters; (4) attended a BB contest … and, well, you get the idea.

And this has, over the last decade or so, landed me in quite a spot.  To be blunt, I am fat and weak.  There, I’ve said it.  But here, I begin again.  Here begins The New Life!