How I Fail

Showing Failure Matters

The paying subscribers that haven’t seen a fitness post for two weeks may be wondering what is going on, or if I was just lying and some grifter. Well, neither, but I have absolutely failed for two weeks. Does it mean the weekly fitness posts will no longer happen? No. They will and this is one of them, but because failure is often more important a requirement than success (on the road to success, not in general) this post will be public. Complete with humiliating ritual of pictures.

Also because when you fail because you are weak, lazy, or a liar and usually all three, you should take a public whipping anyway. Self-flagellation in secret is just not good enough, boys and girls, so here is the Kurgan Kurganing himself. A world exclusive.

The reasons people fail, especially at fitness stuff is essentially, as stated above, because they are either weak, lazy, or both and then they compound the issue by lying about it. To others mostly, but primarily also to themselves, and they do so knowingly.

What they come up with are EXCUSES. A word that really means OUTRAGEOUS LIES. It’s your brain doing the backwards rationalisation thing that is so familiar to women. It’s not ever YOUR fault really. It’s the weather, the fault of your gym, your clothes, the dog, anyone but you.

So, to show this process (which is not really my way) I will not tell you the EXCUSES I could use if I were that sort of liar:

I have been REALLY busy! No, really, listen:

• The tractor’s Tricia (giant grass/weed cutting tool) broke and I spent hours over the weekend with my friend trying to fix it.

• I had people come over for the olive tree maintenance.

• The regular work has been off the chart, which is good, but also takes away from my time.

• It’s summer and I tried to spend some more time with the wife and kids in the evenings.

• I have a couple of other projects on the go to research and am trying a new one out that needs a lot of historical research, and I still haven’t done the covers for the two books that I have essentially finished.

• You know there is random stuff on a farm that always needs attention.

And my health! My HEALTH!

• So about 30 years ago I had a car crash (some guy jumped a stop street at 2 am and I am absolutely lucky to be alive. If he’d hit me one tenth of a second later I would be dead. As it was his Range Rover took out the entire front of the little Toyota I was driving, wheels, engine and all.) As a result of that I have had some spasmed muscles in my neck that even ten years ago, a professional masseuse could not get the thin needles of western acupuncture to go into it even after an hour of massage. the needles bent as if they were made of string or were hitting bone. They were not, that area of my neck has been in an atrophied muscle lock for literally 30 years.

  But a few days ago, after several days of pretty constant pain I asked my wife if she could give me a massage, and somehow, she managed to make that part of my neck muscle actually click! I mean something finally released! I hardly believed it, but it did. The resulting shifting pain since has been quite exquisite (as it is once something like that old an injury starts to finally have blood flow through it again, it can take days or weeks before it’s functioning more or less normally again). And. hey, you wouldn’t want me to injure myself there again, would you, just for the sake of some push-ups or pull-ups or whatever, right? Right?!?

• Oh and my sleep! Let me tell you about my sleep pattern, being so messed up, partly because of work, partly because of my increasing issues with breathing through my nose which has a badly deviate septum due to being broken 4 times (two by own stupidity, and 2 in heavy “training”). I only sleep about 4-6 hours max in any 24 hour period and usually in 2 sets of 2-3 hours each. Today for example, I slept about 4 hours total, but I also had about 2 hours after yet another massage from my wife where I literally lay still in bed just breathing and concentrating on that shoulder/neck muscle injury and it improving. It’s a technique to fix injuries I detail in my Systema book, available on Amazon, in case you care.

I also have 6 kids and a wife and a farm and…

I could go on. I mean I don’t have any pets, but I could write about how the anxiety of the kids not having pets affects by mood and so the sera toning levels are off, and, and, and…

Now let’s look at the reality of things instead.

The Truth

The reality is that none of those things really matter. The shoulder neck injury does a bit, but even then I could be doing exercises that help/benefit it instead of just sitting on my backside typing away here.

To do 50-60 pushups, a couple hundred crunches and leg raises and to go do a few chin-ups on the bar I set up outside —even if I have to lather myself in poison first to avoid the carnivorous little no-se’em insects whose bites itch like the devil— and even if I add say 15 minutes on the training bike and if I were really going over the top another 10-15 minutes on the bag (which I still need to put up outside, though I am nearly there now) would take no longer than an hour.

And while it is a bit of a challenge to carve out an hour daily for myself, it is not impossible by any means. All it would take is some routine and organisation, which admittedly will be easier once school reopens, but that too is also an excuse.

So, what then, has prevented me from posting for two weeks?

My weak mind.

I have never tried to explain this to anyone before, especially not using words anyway, so we’ll see how this goes. I know that for me to get best results, I need my mind to be first in the right space. It’s a bit like writing. I recall Vox saying he writes his massive fiction books in 500-1000 word instalments. Not me. I may need to sit and do “nothing” (as it may appear to external observers) for a few days, then I can churn out a first draft in days of 15,000 words a day. I wrote the Systema book by writing its approximately 200,000 words in about 3 weeks of averaging 10,000 words or so per day.

I think it was Edgar Allen Poe that said a gentleman needs to know the art of being “lazy”. But by lazy he didn’t actually mean lazy. He meant the kind of apparent laziness a man does by sitting on his porch and looking to the horizon in silence.

I am no gentleman and no one has ever accused me of being one that I can recall, but I have had this skill since I was a child, and by my early teens I had come up with a name for it because I was tired of people asking me what I was doing, when I sat there silently for long periods of time. “Watching Clouds”, I’d reply. And in fairness, I distinctly recall lying on the sofa-bed of my small London apartment after my first divorce, some 20 years ago now, looking out the window at the still natural clouds then in summer, and spending an hour or two just, literally looking at clouds, my mind mostly empty of any real thoughts or contemplations. I remember that activity with a rare sense of peace and calm happiness that has been juxtaposed only by a bright light of active happiness once I broke through the pain or exhaustion barrier at Karate Gasshukus (day-long training events) or swimming training when I used to compete.

And with this fitness stuff, I have been sensing that. The need to get my head in the right frame before I begin. I think in part, it’s why my neck/shoulder has released. I don’t think I ever spent 2 weeks before with a mild but active constant unconscious drive to relax and find the right balance internally, despite the chaos outside of me being relatively constant.

My mind has always been the weak spot.

I recall once our karate instructor talking to all the black belts before a national competition event. He was telling each of us in turn what our strength and weaknesses were and how to maximise the first and minimise the second, and his observations were spot on. I was last in the circle of black belts that had gathered around him and I was curious what he would tell me, as his observations and been so absolutely spot on for the others. And it was just as precise when it got to me. He said:

“You… you’re unpredictable. When your head is right no one can touch you. And when it’s not right, you’re completely useless. And I don’t know what makes it right or not. You need to try and figure that out yourself.”

And it had always been the case. I remember years before this, on reading the Illiad I think it was, where at some point someone says “Don’t go into battle with bad blood, or else you’ll spill it.” It resonated deeply.

But even this, my need to get my head right is partly an excuse. Because if a gun was held to my head, I would get on with the exercises anyway. So even the truth of your reasons, if often half a self-deception.

And now for the final piece of brutal truth.

This is a still taken from a little video short that a lady we are good friends with send to my wife of her kids and family. Her husband walked in half-way and got captured. He was not holding his stomach in, posing, or otherwise trying to impress anyone, he’s just not the type to do so anyway. And he has 7 children, plus two more adult ones. So he hardly has any more time than I do. But you know what he has? An easy and unforced iron will.

The last time I saw him, a couple of months back, we all went to the park together with out respective retinue of children, and he firmly, politely, and easily refused to introduce any junk food into his stomach. It was not difficult for him or forced. It was just the causal discipline of someone that had made a clear choice. It is also no coincidence I think, that he actually is a gentleman, and a better Catholic than I will ever be.

The fuzziness, due to it being taken from the video (yes with his permission, or at least his wife’s!) actually does him an injustice.

And in case you were wondering, he too is 56. We are the same age.

So now, finally, the obligatory whipping at the post required in the public square for failure, here is me. I tried to have the same stance and did not try to “beautify” myself with any camera tricks or breath holding, etc. Brutal honesty when you fail is the minimum requirement.

Aside the unflattering eyes, caught in the midst of noticing two of our kids about to do something they have just been told to not do, so shifting from pleasantly calm to the imminent “What the hell are you doing?!” look, giving an overtone of psychopathy, you can see that there is a marked difference between my friend and I. Probably about 3-5 kg of “softness” that needs to be converted to actual muscle, and while the underlying general tone of my musculature is still decent, it’s not something you can see, unlike in his case. And instead of a 6 or 8 pack, I have the approaching dad-bod uni-belly.

So… take heed you fellow lazy, weak, self-deceivers…

Get in gear, or post your chubby selves online for all to point and laugh at!

The fitness posts will resume next week and be a weekly affair, usually Sunday or Monday.