The bad boy put on All I Ask Of You and started writing the fictional account of Johnny and June’s notebook summer but never got further than a piece about June’s 45th birthday celebration.
He worked upon it a bit, massaged it here and there and then took the public words and marked them in private with the idea that maybe they would be revealed upon a different day…maybe.
That is how these things go, with stops and starts, unexpected interruptions and planned endings and unplanned beginnings.
Just when you think you have put it to bed you discover it has died and just when you are certain it is deceased the damn thing makes like the phoenix and there comes a revolution.
Two days of inferior workouts have me feeling grumpier than normal and things that irk me have a sharper edge.
The feeling isn’t enhanced by the gifts of 50 or the inexplicable stupidity of others whose profound ignorance is so stunning it makes me bang my head.
Because maybe, just maybe the denizens of lollipop land have enacted a terrible revenge by forcing me to take up residence in their village of idiots, dolts and dunces.
Wouldn’t that be a nifty welcome to the second half of life.
Part of the reason why these workouts were so poor is I was physically and emotionally spent by the time I started them.
But what throws me is by midnight Thursday and Friday I felt five times as awake and energized making me wonder if maybe I ought to have waited each day to take on the weights and treadmill.
Instead of having to rely upon force of will to make my legs move as they should and engaging a in a ridiculous and potentially unnecessary battle could I have done things differently and generated a different outcome?
Maybe?
Good old maybe isn’t the answer I want to apply to the important questions except time and again it has forced its way to the front of the line.
Because the challenges that have presented themselves have been such that certainty hasn’t existed in advance.
Sometimes the best information and analysis falls short and when you ask if you will like what lies behind door number one is maybe.
Always a joy to know that you might get soft lips or you might get teeth.
It is vanity that makes me want to show the 18 and 19 year-olds the picture of the kid on the left because there wasn’t an exercise he couldn’t have done better than them.
You can’t see all the cuts on his body but the old guy on the right remembers the feeling of ripples and knowing he could keep going harder.
The sense that even when coach pushed them to exhaustion he could another full workout just as hard a few hours later.
That old guy is frustrated because he feels like he is being betrayed by that same body, albeit decades older.
It refuses to do as asked and the question that keeps him up isn’t whether he can make it look like it once did but if he can get it to feel anywhere close t0 how it once did.
What is possible versus probable and how much work will it take to get there measured against two things:
- Can it be done with0ut help from a coach/trainer?
- Will he have the discipline to follow through?
It is a strange feeling to recognize that in some ways life has flipped the script because the things the kid worried about don’t bother the old man.
He knows those answers and figures if he had to start from scratch he could do every one of them again.
That kid never wondered or worried about working for weeks on limited sleep because energy was easy to come by.
The old man knows he can’t match the energy of the kid, but he can still put out prodigious amounts of work in bursts.
Ain’t life peachy.
