Life Lessons From Triathlon: Appearances

I used to be jacked. Ripped. Diesel. I’d walk around in wife-beaters and go jogging shirtless and enjoy how the heads would turn. I know. Vainglory at its finest.

Anyway, as my baseball career faded out about a year ago, so did the desire to lift weights. I quit working out. I kept eating Bojangles and Chik-Fil-A. And I got, well, kinda fat.

I tried getting back in the gym, but it bored me. I tried running, but it hurt.

I gave up.

Then I started training for this triathlon, and felt as though what muscle I had was falling off. (It wasn't really, but I’m a headcase. But that's a blog post for another time.)

Now though, five months later, I’m happy with how I look. My muscles aren’t what they used to be, but my health and fitness is at a peak. Everyone comments on how skinny I’ve gotten.

Through all this changing of body types, I discovered: We look like what we do, which is determined by what we want.

Before triathlon, I wanted (1) to look good but mostly (2) to be better at baseball. Now, I want to stay in shape. So I train. I work out. And nah, I’m not Mr. Muscles anymore, but I’m happy. (That said, I’m going to get my old weights down here sometime soon because my shirts feel like they are falling off of me now. But that’s not really related.)

You can apply the concept across the board. Hang out with people who want to just lay around and drink beer and don’t like exercise—pretty much how I’d become when I wasn’t working—and you’ll get fat and out of shape. It’s pretty simple math. Now I know that there are the genetical anomalies, the people who drink a lot and don’t get fat and the people who don’t work out a lot and can still somehow run a marathon. Just hush, you.

In high school, back when I was hitting the early stages of that get-jacked craze I went through, a couple of my friends and I got really into those workout magazines. We’d study the exercises and drool over the bulging biceps and 18-pack abs. We’ve all been there, right? We wanted to look like that, because whoever looked like that had to be invincible.

We once went so far as to theorize that God meant for men to look like that. Why, if they can look like that, why do we accept looking any different? (It was outstanding logic.)

Many people seem to think that, though—that we are meant to look jacked.

The movie Fight Club comes to mind. Brad Pitt plays the infamous Tyler Durden alongside Ed Norton. Durden is shredded beyond belief. Muscles and striations everywhere. Norton’s character isn’t out of shape, but he’s no Tyler Durden.

During one scene in the movie, Durden and Norton board a bus to find themselves eyeballs-to-abs with a Calvin Klein underwear ad. They smirk. “Is that what a real man is supposed to look like?” Norton asks. His tone insinuates a rhetorical question, a mocking condescension of modern America’s ideal of manliness. They mock the idea of muscles solely for muscles’ sake, and likewise with everything else we’ve come to desire. Why have something just to have it?

“We’re consumers,” Durden once says. “We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty—these things don’t concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy’s name on my underwear.”

Norton’s character says at one point that Fight Club, not work or society or appearances, became their reason to cut their hair short, or trim their nails. It defined their appearance. And I know that, were I in this Fight Club, I’d work out to harden my abs and strengthen my pecs and arms. Why? The harder one’s abs, the more punishment they can take; the stronger one’s arms, the more punishment they can inflict.

But in my pursuit of that, I’d again develop those rippling abs and jacked arms.

My appearance would reflect my desire—the desire to survive the fight. And that’s what I’ve experienced with triathlon. My appearance reflects my desire to survive the training, the race.