As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams... (an introduction)

Briefly: I was not into sports as a kid. Didn't watch them, was no good at them, and didn't care about them. In college I discovered that physical activity was fun, and got into pretty good shape, mostly through boxing. Graduate school came, I stopped boxing, and I got fat and lazy. When I realized that I changed my diet, exercised a bit, dropped a lot of weight, and got into decent shape again. Then I took up climbing, got pretty good at it, got into really good shape, and realized (again) how much I love physical activity. Now I climb, train, run, do yoga, and any other activities I can cram into my schedule. Much to my surprise, athletic activities, fitness, and performance have become major parts of my life, and this is a blog about that.

That's the gist of it. Keep reading for the excruciatingly long-winded version.


A personal history

In retrospect, I was more athletic as a child than I thought I was at the time. I wasn't a bad skier, I would go on long cross-country bike rides with my father, I sailed, I climbed at summer camp, and in high school I would occasionally go to the gym. At the time, though, it didn't really cross my mind that those were "sports." I didn't compete in them, my friends didn't do them with me, and we didn't do them at school, so in my young mind, they were completely separate from what happened in gym class or, for some kids, during recess and on little-league teams. I couldn't run fast, or throw far, or catch or hit a ball well. To invoke an over-used phrase, I was picked last in PE. I was chubby up until late junior high, when I promptly transformed into scrawny. I was always the shortest kid in my class (still am). In short, I was not a sporty kid.

I really didn't care. This is not a story about achieving childhood dreams of athletic dominance. As a kid I had all sorts of other things to keep me occupied, and plenty of more-or-less equally unathletic (read: nerdy) friends to do them with. I didn't watch sports and didn't care that I was no good at them because I was happier doing something else, anyways.

That all changed my freshman year of college. For reasons lost to me now I decided to join a couple of friends for a game of squash. I lost badly, of course, but I had a great time. Running around, chasing the ball, learning the techniques, getting sweaty, competing, all felt great. So I kept playing. I got better (although still usually lost), but what I really learned was the joy of sports.

Sophomore year took it one step further. A friend of mine was talking about how much fun he had training with the boxing club. I had some experience with "boxercise" because my dad had really been into it and I had gone to some classes. I decided to try out the club, figuring I would train but never spar. You would have to be crazy, I told anyone who would listen, to essentially invite someone to hit you in the head. The training was gruelling, but a lot of fun. I made new friends, and the number of push-ups I could do got higher and higher. I put on a couple pounds of muscle. For the first time in my life, I was in good shape.

After a few months, when the people who had joined at the same time as me started sparring, I was shocked to find that I wanted to try it. Immediately after the bell rung the first time I stepped into the ring I got clocked in the head. The rest of the round didn't go too well for me either, but I was hooked. I'll never forget showering afterwards, tasting the blood in the back of my throat, too weak to raise my hands up to wash my hair, and thinking it was the greatest feeling I'd ever had.

I kept it up, boxed at a local gym during the summers, and, by senior year, became president of the university club. I was never a great boxer, never competed other than sparring within my club and gym, but I loved it.

Then came that great black home, graduate school. My new school had no boxing club, and told me in no uncertain terms that they didn't want one (boxing being too dangerous, apparently). There was no local boxing gym to go to. I tried to keep it up on my own, hitting a bag, doing some jogging, but that quickly fell by the wayside. I ate nothing but junk food, and did essentially no physical activity. My parents urged me to work out more, because of a history of heart problems in the family. I ignored them (I once told them "It's graduate school! I'm supposed to let myself go!" in an elevator, producing knowing chuckles from the other occupants).

It was two and a half years later that I realized how bad it had become. On a family vacation for the winter holidays, I weighed myself for the first time that I could remember, probably since finishing college. I had gained almost 30 pounds. That's plenty on anybody, but on my small frame it was 20% more body weight. It dawned on me that my waist size had gone up 4 inches in the past several years. It was time for a New Year's resolution.

I completely changed my diet, stopped eating junk food at every meal, cut out snacks, reduced my portion sizes, and went on a strict regimen of push-ups and sit-ups every day after I woke up and before I went to bed. My weight dropped, the number of reps rose, exercises got added to the routine, and I got back into shape.

Then, a friend took me to the local climbing gym. As mentioned briefly above, I had climbed a bit as a kid, but it had been about 12 years since my last time on a wall. I fell in love all over again. The staff and other climbers were helpful and friendly, and before long I was climbing three days a week. When I was out of town, I would find local gyms wherever I was. I started doing other things with the express goal of improving my climbing: pull-ups and other sport-specific training at home, running for enduring, yoga for flexibility. (Incidentally, yoga ended up being great for my balance, but I'm still as inflexible as ever.)

I'm now in the best shape I've ever been in. Working out has become an important part of my life (an addiction, my girlfriend might argue). I find new and ridiculous challenges to obsess over all the time, like the circuit training of CrossFit and the gymnastics-style moves of Beast Skills. This is a blog about whatever I'm up to now.