These Days, I'm Training for Life
An Old Friend’s Take Stopped Me in My Tracks
A few weeks ago, my old friend Greg Haskell offered up his opinion here that a large majority of the rest of us should “Leave the Running to the Professionals” and immediately piqued my interest. For starters, I knew this wouldn’t just be some flippant opinion but rather a formulated take based on tons of research, conversation, and indisputable fact. But mostly, I just had the feeling that I knew right where he was going with this. Turns out, my gut feel was right on point.
Greg began by saying, “Unless you’re a genetic freak (and let’s be honest, you’re not), jogging is one of the worst things you can do for your body.” He was speaking directly to me but what’s funny is I had already learned this the hard way. I am not a genetic freak—nowhere near that distinction, in fact. I have often described my body type as being reminiscent of an upside-down 9-volt battery. Not a tall man at 5’10”, you might say that I’m either barrel-chested or beer-barreled in the middle (depending on how the diet’s going at any given time), with short (but stout) legs. Add to that the fact that I’m married to a lovely lady who is precisely the same height as I am, but with Hall-of-Fame-level stems, creating the optical illusion that I’m definitely shorter, and maybe I do have some sort of a complex. Anyway ... I’d always gotten by as looking like I was in decent shape but at some point, late in 2018, I wasn’t feeling that way, and then things got off the rails to the point where the battery was looking more like a fattery. I had to do something.
The Orangetheory Era: From Chump to Champ
My wife had started at Orangetheory earlier that year and, after seeing a particularly rough picture of me, at a wedding alongside my beautiful bride with my slovenly self busting out of a dress shirt I definitely had no business wearing at the time, I was looking to get my shit together before my 40th birthday, so I decided to join her under the orange lights. Now, I know OTF isn’t for everyone. Hardcore athletes might prefer its just-as-culty cousin, CrossFit. Others might prefer a traditional gym. But for me, it clicked pretty quickly, what with me being able to simply turn my brain off, do what I’m told, work hard, and reap whatever benefits were coming my way. And they came quickly. In an eight-month period, my body reacted quickly to a drastic uptick in activity, and I lost about 50 pounds. I was down to 17% body fat, which isn’t off-the-charts amazing or anything but for me, it was quite the accomplishment. And I was really achieving from a competitive standpoint. I’d never been a runner and yet, there I was, running a 5:43 mile, and logging 2.02 miles in 12 minutes—two sub-sixes in a row is pretty nuts for someone who had never, ever been fast by any stretch. The Cooper Test told me I was in the “excellent” category with a VO2 Max of 61.4. I’d never even rowed more than a dozen times before starting at OTF and I was doing 500 meters in a shade under 1:21, and 2,000 in 6:24 flat. I even won our studio’s DriTri—Orangetheory’s version of a triathlon, involving a 2,000 meter row, 300 body weight reps, and a 5k on the treadmill, with my best time of 38:08. In a nutshell, I was doing things I never thought I could do, and sustaining, even through the madness that was the Covid era. And then, about 18 months later, I suffered a couple of injury setbacks.
Hockey, Injury, and a Wake-Up Call
Another reason I’d initially set out to get back into some semblance of shape, aside from the picture in which I looked like Shrek and Fiona’s tubby blubber baby, was because my youngest son had showed an interest in playing ice hockey, a lifetime love of mine, and if he was going to be involved, I needed to as well. But I was 12 years removed from hockey and 50 pounds north of where I should have been to mitigate injury. So while OTF helped me get back onto the ice, the ice ultimately begat a foot infection and a high ankle sprain that cost me a total of about 10 weeks off of skates and out of the gym. While high ankle sprains, in particular, absolutely suck, I certainly could have approached this differently and sustained some measure of mobility, but I sulked, got depressed, and really let things go sideways.
Overtraining, Burnout, Depression
By the time that all subsided, and I got back into the gym, I had lost far more than a step. That happened way more quickly than I would have expected. Still able to do most of what I used to do, albeit in smaller increments, things started hurting. My knees and hips started barking, which affected my form (that probably wasn’t very good in the first place, honestly), and soon after, that sent my back into a cycle of suck that made me just not want to be there. Two steps forward seemed to always yield four steps back. A good day in the studio turned into three days of recovery, more frequent chiropractic care, massage therapy, etc. There’s nothing wrong with those measures of healing but what I was putting in just wasn’t adding up to what I was getting out anymore. And go figure, all that weight came back. Maybe even more so. Add to that the fact that I was self-medicating with alcohol on account of depression that ensued, and I was now in a shitstorm of unhealthiness, so, so quickly, after one hell of a run.
But I knew I had to keep moving. And that’s where the walking came in. As Greg pointed out in his piece, I was surely destroying my body with cortisol spikes and overwhelming inflammation. On top of the discomfort, it was ruining my ability to string together any sort of consistency. During my peak run, I would shit on the concept of “power walking,” even after being encouraged to try it here and there when my wonky back would act up. Once, in fact, I remember swearing to my then-coach that, with a back very much on the fritz, I’d walk that day for the duration of my cardio session, and then about five minutes in, there she stood behind me, mouthing to me in the mirror, “You stubborn bastard!” as I wobbled my way through.
Find Your Lane and Just Keep Moving
With the goal now, at 45, primarily tied to leaning out again, naturally, it can’t just be walking alone for me, so again, as Greg suggested, I’m mixing in sprints here and there, and lifting as heavy as I can as often as I can, dialing in the diet, and I’m on my way back to something I can be proud of. Since I want to keep playing hockey as long as possible, and since most of what I do comes against marshmallow millennials half my age that need a good stomping every now and then, I need to make sure this ol’ 9-volt has more wattage than waddle moving forward. After all, I’d love to play on a team with my kid a little bit further down the road. Now, I’m not saying don’t get after it like I did, or harder, if that’s what you want to do from a competitive standpoint still, but what I’m saying is that I had to realize that approach just wasn’t the right one for me anymore. I’m listening to my body and applying an approach of consistency as opposed to one of insanity. Yes, for me, as a non-elite athlete whose heart outperformed the rest of the machine he was given for a time there, that era can be looked back on as insane now. Proud, but insane. A newer coach recently caught wind of that 2.02 in the 12-minute, as I mostly walked my latest effort therein, and turned to me, locking eyes in the mirror while mouthing, “Holy fuck, Jon!” Yeah, I say that too, now.
But more than anything, I’ve learned that I don’t have to be in this cycle of competitiveness that ultimately did more harm than good.That is one of the things I’ve learned about Orangetheory, specifically, after all this time: there are still plenty of ways to benefit and not one is right for all people. You just have to find your zone. Am I proud of what I did for a good while in that upper echelon? Absolutely. Is my body happy with it in the end? Hard to say. Shit still hurts. But with brisk walking, often at an incline, steps on steps on steps outside, hitting the weights, and not eating like a slob, I can at least ensure that I’ll continue to do my most important job at the very least, which is to be a badass dad and husband.
Like Greg said, leave the hardcore running to the pros. At this age, that shit hurts. And, like I said earlier, I probably wasn’t technically ever as good at it as I thought I was in the first place.
Find your thing, whatever it is. Listen to your body. And adapt. But with all that, just find a sustainable level of consistency to keep the machine rolling.
JJ
