miked512’s BodyBlog

“Mike, what are you trying to do?” “What are your goals?” “What are you after?” “Why do you do this?”  Those are all questions I get asked.  It isn’t all that frequent, but when I hear it, it catches me off guard and I usually give them an answer.  If it’s in a life context, if I feel you’re worthy I’ll give you the grand vision of what all I’m trying to accomplish in this life and what I plan on giving to humanity.  If you’re just a norm or I feel you aren’t worthy, I will probably tell you “My main goal in life is to help people solve complex problems efficiently through the use of technology while having lots of fun in the process.”  Most of the time, I get stares of ‘You’re frackin’ crazy”, get called a dreamer, or what have you.  It doesn’t matter which category you fall in to.  The non-worthy goal listing actually applies a lot to the worthy one but this is not the subject of this blog.  This blog, however, is about the training context of the question.  You can delve further into my head and life some other time.
I get asked the question often and my default answer is usually it’s “just a hobby”.  Some people have NEVER asked me the question and that has kept me quite comfortable on the issue.  However, my part-time training partner , mrlongisland1, asked me the question a few weeks ago and I said, “You asked me that before.  It’s just a hobby.”  I thought to myself “This dude asked me that question like my answer has changed.  What the heck?  He just didn’t like my answer.”  Then I got the idea to write a long blog posting about it because what I’m trying to accomplish is a bit more complicated than it needs to be.  And well, no one in their right mind really trains two-three times a day, manipulates their diet to be all healthy, not eat “normal” food,  and  buys boatloads of supplements on the whim of “this is just a hobby”.  Anyone that takes a hobby that seriously has got to be lying and hiding something.

And that is the point of this blog, to reveal what it is I’m hiding.  With this, we must delve into a bit of history for a little bit.

Along time ago, I was a very skinny guy.  This is pretty much all through high school and the beginning of college.  However, I wasn’t like most skinny guys who are at least ripped with abs.  Nope, I was skinny fat.  I possessed the traditional marathon runner build but truth to be told, I really sucked at running.  I still do and at this point I don’t care because … well, that’s a joke that won’t be told here.  I didn’t like being this skinny at all because in all honesty, who wants to look malnourished.  Ha ha, this is what lead me originally to start training in the first place.  It wasn’t because of girls because luckily I never had a problem with them.  It wasn’t because of being bullied/afraid of being beat up because your confidence grows by leaps and bounds when a would be bully ends up with a concussion or a gang of riffraff end up knocked out cold.  Intelligence is so awesome.
So although I started training, I didn’t really take it all that seriously and my nutrition was completely awful.  I grew and it was actually decent minimal fat growth until, as I wrote about on my profile, I got the autoimmune disorder Myasthenia Gravis.  I don’t know if MG has a dietary cause or not but I know I mistakenly came down with it during my college diet of Papa John’s and Mr. Pibb/Coke.  I went through all of the treatments, got it into remission, and happen to still be that way.  However, over time I’ve noticed that cleaning up my diet and training seem to have minimized the number of symptoms of the condition I deal with, leaves me better able to deal with stress and all in all, just feel great.

I guess this means the original goals were:

1) To stop being skinny
2) To get healthy thanks in part to the wreck that Myasthenia Gravis and all of its treatments caused me
3) To lose predenisone fat i.e. get it to acceptable levels

Those were the original goals and since then up until recently, I really haven’t had any and have just been playing around with it.  Oh, I had listed the lofty goal of getting to be 230 lbs and 5% bodyfat but I didn’t really take it seriously.  It was just something of if I got there I wouldn’t be upset.  If I didn’t, I won’t be upset and that’s about it.  I even made up 100 handstand pushups without the wall assist.  In my head, I just trained to train and would have liked to have been strong, huge, and ripped with the ability to move and function like an athlete.  In short, be an athlete that looked damned good.  However, I wasn’t really serious about this and just went through phases and cycles making progress here and there, losing ground here and there, and the like.
I felt fine, was healthy, and was just enjoying life, looking at new ways of training, seeing that this was cool, this wasn’t, and well, it really was just a hobby that relieved stress.  Until of course, late last year after I stopped training seriously to work on a project and gave my athlete power ring to mdrane, I began to notice a problem with myself and my then current training partner at the time.  He never wanted to do more weight, go to failure, or do anything that pushed him beyond his abilities too much.  It was stagnation and complacency despite the fact we both lied to ourselves and I decided, “Enough is enough.”  However, what did I want?  Was I really after 230 at 5% bodyfat now?  Am I really going to cut, pursue strength, or more muscle.  Then of course, on t-nation I read an article about an interview with the great Paul Chek and began thinking, “Why don’t we make this training thing a spiritual pursuit?  You can’t just compartmentalize it.  It’s something that is a part of you?  You’re smart and have a spiritual/religious component  about yourself?  Why do you treat your body as just an afterthought?”  This led me to being to take my body and training through the same thing the “soul” goes through.  

I ended up researching Buddhism a bit and found the six realms of samsara.  These are the phases a soul goes through in order to reach enlightenment.  This was going to be what my training went through in order for me to enlighten my training, make it a part of me and in the end come to either enlightenment or to reach an epiphany and give me something else to struggle with.  This caused me to start at the bottom.  To take my training and body through the worst type of training I could come up with and thus began the twice a day training and the brutal punishment I’ve been putting myself through recently.  I’ve loved it thus far and more details of the actual workout and the like will be posted later.  Just know that in the process, at my midway point, I have somewhat come to a goal with an endpoint, and intermediary steps.

Let’s just say that the being superstrong superathlete is the ultimate goal and will be worked on, but first I have to see what I look like at 230 lbs at an extremely low bodyfat percentage.    Which one am I working on now?  You’ll have to ask me but in the end the true reason that I train is the same reason that shaolin monks do kung-fu.

That probably doesn’t answer your question, but I’m about to go train now because its late, I wrote this all night, and its about that time.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 at 7:50 pm and is filed under Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.