Why I Shouldn't Tell You About My Exercise Routine, Part I
I will note here that the 2+2 Health and Fitness subforum always shows a healthy amount of activity, and it sports (haha) a number of threads with view counts that far exceed what we have here in House of Blogs. We have been gifted as well with an excellent and well-regarded
running journal right here in HOB.
With that said, a lot of us still don't want to hear about your exercise routine. Why is that?
My hunch on this is fairly simple, so I need not attempt to wrap my head around a large chunk of metaphysics, like in the dream essay. In this case it's an instance of reverse Schadenfreude: while we like to see our friends and loved ones succeed and do well in most things, that goodwill does not extend, at all, into endeavors at which we ourselves have tried and failed.
A lot of us have failed, after many attempts, to maintain an exercise routine over the long run. Those who have been successful are those who likely enjoy browsing and posting in HAF. Good for you.
I will post, instead, about my failures, and the type of thinking that I believe might have been the cause of them.
I'll start with the early chunk of dubious success that I had in high school, as I had my cigarette habit to thank for my gains. Nope, I didn't quit smoking then; quite the contrary, I smoked more as I exercised more.
Junior year I hung out for the most part with Bill, a stout and genial Irish Catholic boy who was a fellow smoker and a fellow football player. Our high school did not have tryouts for their football team. If you could make it through the hellish fortnight of two-a-day practices in August, you were guaranteed a spot on the team.
This, however, made for a very large bench. Bill and I were denizens of the pine for our junior year. There were four of us who thought of ourselves as third string defensive lineman, and the three times that season in which a game turned into a blowout and garbage time approached found us all sidling over to the coach so that he could see us and pick us out for our 2 or 3 minutes of actual game time. So if I want to be accurate, I was really more like 3.5th string.
Anyways, Bill and I liked to smoke cigarettes, but we couldn't do it during school hours. I had originally transferred over from a high school wherein the entirety of the smoking rules for kids had been as follows: (1) Make sure that you are somewhere outside when you light up, and (2) Do not let your smoking habit interfere with class time. That was it, no one ever batted an eye at little 14-year-old me puffing away in different locations outside the school several times a day.
At the new high school, the rules were more strict. They had one designated student smoking area outside, and kids needed to be either 18 years old, or 16 years old and having their parents' permission to smoke. I viewed this change as being a step or two away from pure Fascism.
Neither Bill nor I wanted our parents to know that we smoked. Bill was a good kid, and my form of rebellion against my parents was to try to see how much I could sneakily get away with without harming my status as a good kid.
By the end of the school day, Bill and I were usually dying to smoke a few cigs, so I came up with the idea of us telling our folks that we would be going to the gym. Bill didn't like to lie to his parents, so he countered with, "Why don't we actually go to the gym, and actually work out, and then smoke as much as we want afterwards?"
It was an inspired idea, and it led to the longest consecutive exercise routine streak of my life, lasting longer than a year. Bill and I did not work very hard at the gym, but--thanks to our nicotine addictions--we were as consistent as hell, and after about a year of working out, on the third game of the football season in my senior year, I found myself lining up as the starting first string defensive tackle, a position that I maintained with some success for the rest of that season.
I also finished that season up to around a half a pack of Marlboro reds a day. Bill, on the other hand, was up to a full pack a day, and he hadn't made it through the two-a-day practices that year, so when it comes to smoking and exercising, your mileage may vary.
I will get into my subsequent failures to maintain an exercise routine and the thinking that led to them in
Part II.
Last edited by suitedjustice; 04-23-2021 at 07:13 AM.