16-20 Minute Read
The Morning It Started
My habit is to wake up almost seven days a week, go to the bathroom, wash my face, drink some water, pour two inches of coffee into a glass with some vegan milk, and sit down on the sofa while everyone is still asleep, and write. For the last five years, you can ask my wife, it is almost impossible to get me away from writing. It is my favorite form of relaxation and reflection.
One morning the books were gone. Three series I had been working on for more than a decade, off to the printer, and I was finally, technically done. I do not like to look at them again once they go, because I will always find something wrong, something annoying, a detail I left out, or God forbid a typo.
That morning I woke up with my eyes still closed, coming back into consciousness, into the world of things, space, time, people, a timeline that has to be followed. In the dream world there is none of that. There are just images that appear. I have learned to watch them, and when I am waking up I like to reflect on the movie I just saw.
And I said to myself, it is time to write about fitness and movement. I got excited again. I sat there before I got out of bed and had a moment of gratitude that at fifty-seven I am still in the game, still doing my stuff, in a body that is always changing. I started to cry a little from the size of the gratitude, not from sadness.
The Law I Woke Up With
Words came into my head out of the dream, and I remembered them because I was lucid at the end of my sleep.
There are laws in this universe, and humans like to try to discover them. For every one we might know, there must be millions we have not come near. So let us stick to the simple ones. Everything in this universe, from A to Z, is moving from point A to point B. The law is that everything must keep moving.
Our planet is moving. You know that. But it feels strange down here, because when we sit still we feel static. We are not. We are spinning on our own axis, and circling the sun, and the sun is not parked either. It is carrying this entire solar system around the center of the galaxy at about five hundred thousand miles an hour.
So the true path of this planet is not a circle. If you could stand outside it and watch, you would see a long stretched helix being drawn through space, a corkscrew pulled out roughly twenty four times longer than it is wide, leaning at an angle to the plane of the galaxy, with a slow second wave riding on top of it as the sun rises and sinks through the disk over millions of years. Earth never crosses its own track. It has never once been in the same place twice. There is no return trip and there never was.
And here is the part I like most. The shape depends on where you stand. From here it looks like a circle. From the galaxy it looks like a helix. From somewhere else it looks like something else again. There is no fixed point in this universe to measure from. The motion is the only thing that is real in every frame.
We are machines that have to move to get to things. The body is designed to move, and it runs into a lot of problems when the user decides not to. That is just the fact of it. It does not mean you cannot be an anomaly, sedentary, eating garbage, and still live to ninety-nine. There are always outliers. But that is not the normal thing, and you know that too.
Brooklyn, 1969
I was born in Brooklyn in 1969. The reports from my parents were that I was a hyperactive child who could not sit still. By two I was a handful. I had an unbelievable amount of energy, and looking back, that energy was never harnessed properly. My parents did not know what to do with me.
Neither of them was active. My mom and dad would walk that long sidewalk on Ocean Parkway on Saturdays to be seen in the community. That was it. If you asked me whether they walked one mile or ten on those days, I would say about half a mile. Lifting weights was not a common thing back then, and even if it had been, they were not into it. My grandparents did not have the bug on either side. My sister really did not have it.
But I did. According to my mother, at two years old I would climb out of my crib and not have the patience to wait for a diaper change. I would rip the diaper off and throw it to the side, and if there was a poop in it, I would do laps around the living room with a poop stain on me. Sorry, I find that funny. It sounds like me exactly.
From that age to nine there are not many memories. I loved my Big Wheel, that plastic three wheeled bike with the low seat, and I crashed it into everything. I rode it so hard that I cut my lower back on it, and I still have the scar where the seat met the bottom of the backrest. I wore the plastic wheels down flat. By seven I was climbing trees with one of my first cousins at their summer house in New Jersey. By ten I was the daredevil of the group. It was not that I liked the attention. I just liked what I could do. I was partly fearless, and I was agile and confident, and when I climbed a tree I went all the way to the top branches, out where nobody else would go near.
But like most people I had a lot of frightening experiences as a child, and I was being raised by highly anxious people on all sides with no relief in sight. It was oppressive, to say the least. My passion for movement got stifled early, by having no parents who would play with me, and by anxiety and confusion about what I was feeling. I was still a kid who was afraid of the dark. I do not remember my dad being around much, and when he was, I cannot remember a single time we threw a ball together.
The Dead Zone
There is a period in my youth that is a blank slate. No movement at all, from about eleven until I got sober in AA at fifteen. Even after I got sober the dead zone continued. I did not have the bug yet. I was busy with everything internal that was going on. I had self esteem issues. I had acne. I was small and undeveloped.
What I remember from fifteen to eighteen is push-ups. A lot of them. I built my chest that way, and I used them against the pressure of cravings, cigarettes and weed mostly. Whenever one came I would drop and do ten. That was the thing that reset my mind. Thank God I had it.
Athletically I was an underachiever. In California my dad signed me up for a basketball team and I had no skill for it at all. That was the end of it. There was no other sport he tried. I did not play baseball. I was not on track. I did not swim. So I carried all that pent up energy from the time I was a little boy and never found an outlet for it, and I could have used it in my teenage years to offset my troubles.
The Frisbee Field
By nineteen I had moved back to New York, a rough teenager trying to start his life over. By twenty-one I had a tiny apartment in Manhattan on 59th Street for four hundred dollars a month. I still did not know a thing about fitness.
And then it just happened. I must have been twenty-two, maybe twenty-three. A childhood friend invited me to Central Park to play ultimate frisbee with a loose group of about sixty people who would break into smaller teams. The games ran three or four hours.
That was the first time I had ever really picked up a frisbee. I came to the field, shook hands with a bunch of people, and got put on a team of seven. One side started the round by throwing the disc all the way across to the receiving team, and it came down right by my head. I did not dare touch it. Somebody else caught it. I sort of understood the rules, which came down to this, run forward, catch what somebody throws you, and no matter what, handle the disc once you have it. For the first half hour I was catching it and throwing it back wobbly to whoever was open. I got that far.
By the second hour I was the only person anybody was throwing to.
Nobody could keep up with me. No one could guard me. No one could block me. I would run at the speed of a bullet, get into the end zone, put my hands up, and there was the disc, no problem. It was right there on that field on that day that I realized I could run fast. Man, could I run fast. I remember the feeling of taking off, bolting ahead of anyone covering me, moving so fast it felt like neither foot was touching the ground. Because I was running to outrun someone, and I was competitive, somewhere deep in my mind I understood that I was not allowed to get tired. And I could make sharp jagged cuts back and forth endlessly, so I was always open.
I showed up every Saturday that summer and played from start to finish, no matter how long we were out there. I was tanning my body. I found my legs. I found my lungs. I fell in love with it and it changed me. From that point on I needed a lot of movement to feel okay. I loved the team. I loved feeling good at something. I loved the mountain bike ride from my apartment to the park. I loved being covered in dirt at the end of the game.
In one game I put myself in front of one of the strongest throwers at exactly the wrong time. He launched it backhand from about ten feet away and the disc connected with my eyebrow. It was like getting punched. It split the skin underneath and I was bleeding like I had been shot. And I loved it so much that I did not want to wipe it off. I wanted to keep playing with the blood running down my face. I am sure nobody liked that except a handful of lunatics like me. Somewhere in my collection there is a picture of me coming off that field, dirt all over my body, dirt in the cut, blood dried on my face. You can see I was having fun.
I do not want to paint myself as a psychopath. I am not one. I am just not squeamish, and somewhere deeply embedded in my mind I fantasized about being a warrior, which I think is stupid today, but it is the kind of thing that gets installed in you. The movies I grew up on were Schwarzenegger and Stallone, big muscled guys doing remarkable things. They were the hero and I was not. Of course that was sitting in my thinking.
The Gunks
From ultimate frisbee, which people call a nerdy college kids game but is a real sport, I went to rock climbing.
My cousin was a pioneer. He was always a step ahead of me with some interesting sport, and he got me into all of them. He was already climbing, he had the harnesses, the shoes, the gear. So of course I had to. From twenty-three, he and I and a handful of childhood friends would take the long drive to the Shawangunk Mountains, which are famous for climbing. We were a bunch of kids top roping, anchoring to something strong like a tree at the top of the climb with somebody on the ground belaying.
Once again I found something I could do with relative ease. I was the strong climber and I was fearless. I hired a guide to take me on harder routes. I had stamina and I was willing to practice. I loved to rappel, and I loved the bag of gear that came with the sport. One time in 1992 my cousin and I decided the 59th Street Bridge would be a great place to climb and rappel off of. We did that more than once. Thank God nobody got hurt.
Eleven Years In The Sky
One weekend up there I got to the top of a climb and looked out across the valley, and several miles away I saw tiny parachutes popping open and circling a drop zone. I said to myself, holy shit, what is that. I thought it was hang gliding. I did not realize everybody up there had just left an airplane, because you cannot see the freefall from that distance. Whatever it was, it was exciting, and it was right over there.
My cousin went and tried it first and reported back that it was unbelievable, which meant I had to go. I did my first tandem in 1992. My jumpmaster was Mark Tripari and he wore a turquoise jumpsuit. I was wearing acid washed Gap jeans, a white tank top, and brown Doc Martens. The fashion was horrible. But getting up in that airplane, getting hooked to the jumpmaster, and leaving the plane was unforgettable. I could not believe there was an entire universe of people who did this, and all that equipment they had figured out.
On the car ride home I was thinking, wow, that was a thrill, but Jesus, that was way too intense for me to ever do alone. Once the adrenaline wore off I decided it was fun and I would probably never do it again. That is the normal thought process. Any normal person would have it. Then a week later my cousin reported that he was already enrolled in jump school and going for his license. Well, I could not let my cousin have a skydiving license if I did not have one.
So I went back and started ground training. My first solo jump was clean. Two jumpmasters left the airplane holding the sides of my harness, and at fifty-five hundred feet I did the little wave off, stayed stable, pulled the ripcord with my right hand, and the canopy came open. And then I was alone, and it was quiet. Not really alone, because you wear a one way radio, and the first thing you hear is a voice saying, okay Marcus, click your heels together so I know you can hear me. So I clicked my heels. Great. Now turn one hundred and eighty degrees, because you are flying away from the airport. Of course I was.
That winter my cousin and I went to DeLand, Florida, a place you would otherwise never go, about eighteen miles inland from Daytona. True Florida country, snakes, gators, and heat, and also the headquarters of the skydiving world. The big teams trained there. Every manufacturer of equipment was in that area. And there we were, brand new to the sport.
I was in skydiving for about eleven years and retired with twenty-three hundred jumps. I produced training films, rounding up the experts to do the teaching. I co-wrote a book with a great jumpmaster. I had a gear store, parachute rental, a rigging loft, souvenirs. I was really in that industry and I loved it. By 2001 I was already phasing out, living upstate and commuting down to the city to see friends, especially in winter. I sold the business and I was ready to be grounded again. I did not quit abruptly. It faded out. And then I needed something new. I could feel it.
Thai Boxing
That is when I found Thai boxing. I used to train at Crunch a few blocks from my apartment. They had a big ring on the second floor, and one day I noticed a bald fitness guy holding pads for someone. It looked cool. I mustered up the courage, went over when he finished, and told him I wanted to try it. He took out his PalmPilot. Sure, let's set up an appointment.
I showed up in black karate pants, because that is all I had and it seemed appropriate. He snickered and said, I am not training you in those, and went into his bag and handed me a clean pair of Thai shorts, cut very short so you have freedom of movement. We got in the ring and moved around. I sucked at it, naturally. But I did not get tired, and I followed direction well. I trained with Steve for several months, and when he opened his own place I was his first paying member. During construction we would sweep the floor and train right there before anything was built.
In the first year I went down to the nationals in Virginia at one hundred forty-seven pounds. My first opponent was not in great shape but he was experienced, and he performed better than I did. I lost on points. Looking back, I did not understand what I was supposed to be doing. I came in trained, but I did not get what the ring performance was. I was supposed to move like a Muay Thai fighter, get busy, throw things, get in there fearless and fight. Instead I was reserved, as if I had all the time in the world to work my opponent. I did not. Those were two minute rounds. I did not get tired and I did not get hurt, I just did not perform the way I needed to in order to win. I figured that out on the way back to New York.
Steve asked me how much I weighed. I said I had no idea. He put me on the scale. One hundred fifty-five. He said, well, you have to drop seven pounds in two weeks, I took a fight for you. I remember having no feeling about that except okay. I had done dangerous things. I accepted. But this fight I was not going to lose. I understood now that it was a performance in front of judges and an audience, and that there was a method to it. I was thirty-four, fighting twenty and twenty-two year old kids, and my age worked to my advantage because I could think. In the first round I was nervous. The kid came prepared to kill, and I had to get hit hard a few times to wake up and say, alright, let's do this. I won that one on decision, and a cluster of fights after it, Friday night performances in front of decent crowds.
Thai boxing was a wonderful sport for me. I could train for hours and never get tired. I healed quickly and I took direction. Skydiving had taught me how to learn, so I did whatever my trainers told me, and that included how I slept, how I ate, what time of day I trained, when I did not train, and when I would fight next. It was the perfect place to phase completely out of the sky, because I was addicted to adrenaline and to intensity, and it was my distraction. Letting go of skydiving was hard because I had so many friends and so much history in it, but this was just as exciting, ironically safer, and I did not have to drive two hours to get to a drop zone.
I trained at my trainer's gym in Thailand. When I hung up my gloves my record was eight and two against good opponents. I kept training for about six more years with a fighter's intensity, and I loved sparring. Nothing I ever do will replace what Thai boxing was, because it was rigorous exercise all the time, training to fatigue. Miraculously I did not pick up many injuries. Not my knees, not my shoulders, not my back. My five foot eight frame was built for impact and movement.
What Came After The Intensity
Between skydiving and Thai boxing I got all of that testosterone out of me. All that male intensity. That is why in my mid forties I went from dabbling in yoga to being immersed in it. Yoga became the transition.
In my forties I still loved rough sports. My mountain bikes had big tires. I was still doing bag work and private pad work with good coaches, and I loved shadowboxing. But nothing gave me an adrenaline rush anymore, and that was fine, because I was older and I had a child. The adrenaline shifted into business. Business gave me the dopamine, and making money replaced all of this fitness nonsense. Fitness had been far more important to me than money for a long time, and I probably fell behind financially by at least a decade because I was so devoted to sports that took all of my attention.
Now You
This is where you enter the picture, because none of the above is the point.
I have no idea what your level of fitness is. Where are you starting from? Are you a fit person who has to exercise, the way I had to? Or are you sedentary, and you do not know that much about the body, but you know it matters and you want to get into it? Are you trying to lose weight? Are you trying to tighten your abs so you look good on the beach? All of that is fine. Or are you trying to get out from under pain and mobility problems and stay in the game?
Do not compare yourself to Usain Bolt or Michael Jordan. What they did was spectacular compared to what an average person can do. If you are a competitive person like me, the competition is always with yourself. Do not sit and reflect on other people's ability, because it becomes a source of anxiety, and anxiety is a survival mechanism, and too much of it is not good for you. You know that already. Relative to yourself, you can be at one hundred percent.
Here is where I have landed after all of it. The only things I really need now are walking and yoga. Those two are all encompassing. I do more than that, I lift weights one or two days a week, late in the day, because it helps and it gives me options on days when the schedule will not let me get to a yoga school. But I live in New York and I get to walk a lot.
Walking
I find walking to be the first primary movement for creatures like us. We are designed to walk. We can run, but running does not seem to be part of the design so much as an option, a way to get out of trouble or get somewhere fast. We are not really built for long distance running. Walking builds strength, keeps things aligned, and lets the body drop into place. Running wears us down faster. There is more impact, and it requires genuinely good form so that over the years we are not damaging ourselves. Walking has much more forgiveness in it.
So if your primary movement is walking, you are doing great. And if you do nothing at all, walking is the best place to start, because it is exercise and it also gets you from here to there, which all of us need to do anyway. It is great if you have a dog, because they need it and you have to get them out. If you do not, set yourself a route. The real value is that walking is a moving meditation. You can stay in the present moment and breathe, instead of holding your breath the way we do in life. If you need more challenge, walk a little faster and a little longer.
I am not saying running is bad. It is an unbelievable fitness program, the breathing, the endorphins, the strength, the feeling of being empowered. It is wonderful, and you should do it as long as you can. Just make sure you do it correctly. Make sure you rest. Listen to your body. Know how to heal. Have other things you can do in between, and definitely have exercise you can fall back on when you are injured.
No Gym, No Weights, No Space
Your fitness begins with understanding that you need routines that do not require a gym, do not require weights, and do not even require much space. Some people call this the prison workout, the thing a man might do locked in a cell with an incredible amount of anxiety. There are body types that understand they had better get moving or they will start doing something destructive, because the boredom and the anxiety will overwhelm them.
The reason to have a basic routine right there by the bedside is that we cannot let our circumstances stop us from moving. There are no excuses. There is always time. In fact, right now is the perfect time for me to stop writing, put the laptop down, and do ten minutes of something before the kids wake up and the day gets noisy and the window closes on me. I will feel it later if I skip it.
The Golden Rules
Whatever we start the day with is likely to become the tone of that day. If we open with negative thinking, we will probably stay in it most of the day unless we find a way out. If we open with gratitude, ten full cycles of deep breathing through the nose, and a little easy light movement to get the body going, that is the foundation of the day. And like everything else, we can only take it one day at a time.
So I begin my morning by sitting upright on the edge of the sofa in the living room while everyone is asleep. I touch my knees. I praise them for all the work they have done for me. I give them a little massage and I say, come on guys, it is time to get busy. Depending on your body and where you tend to get injured, it is a good idea to give yourself a gentle massage there. If it is your lower back, rub your lower back, breathe, and concentrate on moving correctly for the rest of the day.
Working With Pain
If you are dealing with lower back pain, or a knee, or a shoulder, or a hip, we are not going to be defeated by it. It is a topic. It is one subject among the many subjects in a life. Working with injury is one objective among all the other objectives we carry. It is uncomfortable and distracting and it can get depressing if we let it, but it is a challenge we accept.
If we are injured we need to be cautious, and the goal is to heal, not to make it worse. The goal is to learn about that injured part as deeply as we can, to understand the mechanics, to look for ways to strengthen rather than to fade. We move at our own pace. We do not get distracted by other people's ability and we do not get lost in the frustration of it. We work through it for as long as it takes.
Real injuries, not muscle strain, need intervention from people who understand these things. You do not just run on a painful knee or force a range of motion you do not have. That is not smart training. When the body is in pain we stop first, we limit the range of motion, we rest. Then we identify the problem as accurately as we can. Some injuries require immobility for a while, letting the body heal on its own, and then building your way back. Others require movement and strengthening of the muscles that support the area. Some require a trainer or a physical therapist. Some require surgery. Whatever it is, we do it. That is life. There is no point wallowing in it and asking why it is like this. It just is.
Here is the golden rule I want you to keep. From now until your last breath, you will find a way to move a part of your body that is not in pain. If all you can do is pick up a pen and open and close your fist, you are still in the game. Do not give up on your body.
And on the other end of the spectrum, if you are in incredible shape with no injuries and you are trying to reach the top level of your game, the work is exactly the same. Work at your best, work at your maximum, and then rest.
Where The Mind Goes
The last thing, and maybe the most important, is where the mind rests while the body is moving.
The mind is an interesting machine, because we can drift right out of whatever we are doing. You can be running and thinking about business or a relationship, which means you miss the moment entirely. You are moving, but you are not there.
I believe that a lot of the times I hurt myself, it was because I was distracted. I was not paying attention to the present moment. Twenty-three hundred jumps out of an airplane and eight fights in a ring, and the injuries did not come from the danger. They came from the moments I was not in the room.
Everything in this universe is moving from point A to point B, and none of it gets to be in the same place twice. Neither do you. So walk, and be there while you are walking.