Inspiration and Wonder from My Time as a Personal Trainer

No, no one's hired me as a personal trainer. I decided I would help my son succeed in his first attempt at competing in an individual sport: cross country running in the Public School system. He's eight years old.

My son has always struggled physically. He's not physically handicapped but he has other emotional struggles that have limited him in the past. He has always lagged behind with his fine motor skills and is even surpassed by some things that his four-year old sister can do. As his father who loves him, I have fiercely tried to help him overcome these limitations.

He's active but not a "jock." He's not a sports-oriented kid by any means. He's played soccer and it was a struggle. Mostly he doesn't participate in the games and is overwhelmed by the whole thing, but he happened to be on three teams that won A or B-side trophies so he felt proud and happy about the experience. 

Cycling is something that got into him at an early age, long before his dad could even get on a bike, so it wasn't me who influenced him. He runs around a lot, but not for sustained periods. In fact, he used to skip or hop involuntarily after taking only a few strides while running. This slowed him down in his soccer games. His coordination has been very slow to develop but it's coming along.

Even as a fat kid I had a whole lot of fun playing unorganized sports when I was a kid. I was no jock either but I had fun. In a world where obesity seems like an unstoppable epidemic, I want to encourage my kids to embrace an active lifestyle for the rest of their lives.

I started my son training about a month or so before his first race. I put him on the treadmill at home which he's used before, but mostly because he's seen me using it. He'd walk fast and hop every few steps involuntarily. It was unnatural and a little bit concerning. He loved looking at the numbers and seeing how far and how fast he was going. That continued into our training.

I got him to jog at a speed that prevented him from hopping every few steps. The treadmill forced him to keep going in a continuous, fluid motion. His heart and lungs could more than keep up at that speed. Soon he was asking me if it was time to do his training each day. He made charts to put on the wall to track his progress and even set goals for himself. I'm so proud of him.

Quickly, the hopping disappeared and he was getting faster and faster, covering the 1.2 KM distance of the race. He started running 1.2 KM at 10 minutes and 40 seconds. As he progressed, he pushed himself further to beat his "record" times. And he did, shaving 30 seconds or more off when he tried hard. I told him that you try to shave one or two seconds off when you're doing this sort of thing but he proved me wrong time and time again.

His last training session on the treadmill came in at 6:12. When we started, I had hoped he'd get down to 7:30. In the qualifying race he came in 14th and got to go onto the final race of fifty kids. We never dreamed he'd do that well. In his final race he came in 23rd. We call him the 23 fastest eight year old in the city. Had he shaved another 20 seconds off, he'd be the fastest. It's been surreal, especially since the kid couldn't even run properly when we started.

Even now he doesn't hold his arms up in a punching like motion when he runs. Instead, he flails them around randomly. We worked on this a bit at the end and made some progress. But it illustrates how physical things don't come naturally to him.

So what have I learned?

It was an astonishingly wonderful gift to watch my son's body and technique improve the way it did in a few weeks. And it was hardly work for him. The kid barely broke a sweat. 

Even in the last week, I could see his heart and lungs getting undeniably stronger from the training he did the week before. He could do far more at the same breathing level than he did a few days earlier. An eight year old's body can repair itself and strengthen really fast. A night's sleep does the trick.

I've seen this progress in myself, measured by constant heart-rate monitoring. But to see it happen before your eyes in a person you love is beyond description.

It reinforces the notion that you are the master of your body. You can change your body and it is ready to change for you. 

Running, I hope, will be a part of my son's life until the day he dies. He needs it, not only to stay healthy physically, but for all the psychological benefits it will bring him as well.

Fitness as a cure for another fatal disease: Aging

Hours after celebrating my 46th birthday, I had self-assessment done of how well my summer went for my body: I went to the gym for the first time in three months and did my usual workouts.

I worried I would be sluggish doing what I do at the gym because I hadn't done those things all summer. But I did take up mountain biking, which can be straining on one's cardiovascular system, even for novices. And even when I didn't pedal my still-heavy body up those hills, I got off and walked the rest of the way.

Turns out, I'm fitter and stronger than I've ever been. Having fun all summer led to a stronger, more efficient heart and lungs, and seemingly more muscle mass to carry me around. How do I know? I did far more with less heart. I monitor my heart-rate and know that it took a lot more to get it up to the top of the target zone than it did when I was last at the gym at the beginning of summer. I even ran out of incline on the treadmill. It's as if my heart grew five sizes this summer. (Sorry for the Grinch reference so early in the season.)

My birthday made me think of two things. Firstly, birthday's are a psychological challenge for me with my eating and binging habits. Everyone's different but my plan of attack is to eliminate "holiday reward eating." If you pig out on whatever you want on your birthday (I probably achieved 4000 calories or more in the past), you may want every day to be your birthday (or Christmas, etc.) If you're having a bad day, you may say to yourself, "I want today to be like past happy days so I'm going to eat a bunch of junk food until I feel sick."

I kept the cake small so there were no left-overs to have for breakfast or midnight snacks, and ate like I do every other day. It's bad enough I'm one year older, why should I knock days off my life by eating really badly? And one bad day of eating poorly usually leads to more bad days (for me.)

I spent the day mountain biking with my son on the the most beautiful of fall days you could imagine. Usually I'd be at home sprawled out on my bed will full belly, digesting in anticipation of my next birthday reward meal. Best birthday I've had in years.

My second birthday problem: Getting older.

Aging is a fatal disease. Eventually it'll kill you if nothing else does. I overcame most of the ill-effects of obesity by getting fit. I think I can do much of the same with my other fatal disease.

Instead of slowing down in my middle-age, I'm picking up speed, doing more things and having more fun, getting stronger and healthier instead of the opposite.

Fat or thin, aging will take it's toll. Getting active is the secret to warding off old-age.

Buffalo Pound Park: Then and Now

Entering Buffalo Pound from the north (Wikipedia)

I went out and had me some fun with the family at one of the closer provincial parks to the city where I live. It's in a river valley that cuts into the endless flat prairie. In other words, there's hills, something I'm not used to.

The last time we were there was about two years ago. I know because I took lots of pictures. That's about all I could do then. I was very concerned at the time with how little I could do and how I was letting down, if not embarrassing my family because of the unfortunate condition I had allowed myself to descend into.

It was all I could to walk to the beach from the parking lot and sit for awhile. I didn't enjoy myself, not only because I couldn't do anything, but because I was tense and generally sore and tired. But thus was my life at the time, the life I thought I would always have until one day the lights would go out.

I thought about the contrast between this visit and my last visit to the park. This time I was cycling up and down hills with my eight year old son. We had a great time looking at wildlife walk right in front of us as we glided down hills on our bikes, enjoyed the silence of the quiet park in the shoulder season and I had that missing energy and pep to live my life (almost) as I want to.

I didn't take any pictures this time. I was too busy living.

My Life-long Love Affair With The Bicycle

The closest relationships are built on trust.

My new-to-me bike passed the hug test last night. I've been fixing it up after buying a few weeks ago but something came over me when I was putting it away. It was a feeling of fondness that you don't have for an object normally. It got me to wondering.

Near the beginning of my fitness quest when I dusted off my other (road) bike after ten years of being hauled around the country and stored in garages, it was like getting re-acquainted with an old friend, a close friend.

Looking at and touching that bike as I inspected it brought back a flood of memories. We had been through a lot together and covered a lot of miles, some far from the security of home. I realized that I trusted that bike. I know it sounds odd, but there's something about the bonding of rider and bicycle that creates an emotional relationship between man and machine.

It's something about knowing what it can do, when it can do it and how it relates to what you can and cannot do. Knowing it won't break down and, most importantly, knowing the positive emotions you've experienced in it's presence. I've always enjoyed bike riding, it's instilled in my DNA.

It's one more punishing sadness about my 10+ year decent into the abyss of obesity.