What I Learned in the Three-fold Land

I don't know if y'all have noticed this, but comics are pretty popular right now. It's the age of the nerd. What was once discussed in hushed tones in brick basements has become a pop-cultural norm.

It's an exciting time, filled with all kinds of interesting discussion. The ethics and morality of our heroes is a constant subject of debate on comedy websites and philosophy courses. The reality of fandom is also becoming a subject of discussion, particularly with regard to questions of feminism and diversity. It's fascinating stuff, it really is.

What might surprise most of my fellow nerds, though, is how this is being appropriated in the fitness industry.

No, for real! This is totally a thing. I think I can point out to you almost exactly where it started happening, too.

Never you mind the fact that he was lean to start.

Everybody's seen 2011's Thor, right? Chris Hemworth's transformation was a jaw-dropper, from an aesthetic standpoint. He was one of the most recent actors to develop the physique, but he's also really the first one to do so in a post social-media world.

(An argument could be made for Christian Bale in 2005 with Batman Begins, but he's such a transformer that from an industry perspective, it's kind of mundane).

And it's not a dudes-only kind of thing. You're seeing a lot of it happening with females who act in these films. Jennifer Lawrence is a particular favorite of mine, given that she had to undergo some serious strength training to prepare for the role of Katniss Everdeen.

Off to undoubtedly do a thing involving strength

And you know, she's actually a good spring board for what I wanted to talk about. Comics are not the first place to draw inspiration from when it comes to physique and physical capability. You can find it in literature too.

I mean, look at Lord of the Rings. In The Two Towers, you have Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas running down a bunch of Uruks across the plains of Rohan. They not only run this distance, day and night, but are in shape such that when they catch the Uruks, they are prepared to fight and slay.

How badass is that?

Me, though, I didn't draw my inspiration from them. I drew mine from Robert Jordan's Aiel.

Go ahead. Say hello. Don't ask them to dance.

The Aiel, in case you didn't read the Wheel of Time series, are a sort of composite culture. Think a mix of Native American, Zulu, and Celtic Ireland. They were my first real badasses, and to this day I have a soft spot for them.

Which I swear has nothing to do with the fact that they're basically desert ninjas.

Beyond feats of superhuman endurance - running 20 miles a day faster than a horse, with energy left to fight at the end - what really stands out for them is their culture. They have a complicated system of honor and obligation that nobody can make heads or tails of. This is something that, as they become more a part of the rest of the world, generates much comment.

They are savage. They are weird.

As for me, I think there's something to be learned from in that.

So often, in the real world, we hear that we shouldn't worry about getting in shape, that we're 'fine as we are.' As if the norm is for us to become obese, insulin-resistant, dependent upon a flawed and broken system that is only interested in creating more problems so that it can solve them.

Forget that. If that's normal, I embrace strangeness, and the alien ideas that come with it. We are all of us made of sterner stuff than the broken culture tells us we are.

Still, I can't imagine I'm the only one who's ever read a book and thought, man, that was cool. So let me open this up for conversation: who are some fictional badasses that inspired you? What made them stick out in your mind?

Futility, Thy Name is English!

I saw an article today, talking about the end of the English major. It was about how there are less and less of the students actually undertaking this field of study. It's going the way of the Latin major, a useless holdover of a bygone age.

This does not surprise me.

Before I offer my opinion, let me show you my circumstances. I attended North Carolina State University, majoring in English with a concentration in Creative Writing. I wasn't particularly in love with NCSU over any other college, save for two things: one, that I went to high school just down the street from there and two, that they reached out to me while I was in high school. I was the first person in my family to attend college, and the first to graduate.

To come back to it: this article is a rallying cry. It's not over, the author says. English is a good thing, and it's worth teaching.

I agree with the heart of this concept, on the whole. But I don't think it really applies to me.

I'm a writer. My job is to tell stories. Some of them are not fictional, but all of them hopefully have some element of the truth in them. So here's a true thing: my being a writer is not now, nor has it ever been, defined by me having a piece of paper. I could have gone off to be an auto mechanic, and sat down at my computer at the end of the day with grease in my fingernails, stinking of sweat and motor oil. But the story would still come out if the words were in me. Like they do now.

Here I am. I am a borderline bro. I have a total man crush on my biceps. I fret over my workout programming and how many pull ups I can do. My hands are calloused from hanging from the bar, from swinging the kettlebell. But the words come, and I can bleed on the page with the best of them.

Did I really need to spend tens of thousands of dollars just to learn to do something that I was doing already anyway?

I don't know. I don't claim to have any answers for anyone, here. But if I don't need the Major to be who I need to be, and my freaking vocation is tied to it, then what use is it really?

(Perhaps the argument can be made in the value of English Major as the shelter of those souls who find themselves in the works of the past, in Shakespeare and Chaucer and Bradbury. But keep in mind: all that means is that you're running away from the real world, choosing to engage in an extremely limited fandom and asking to get paid lots and lots of money for it. At best, it's an extremely sanctimonious con: you write your fanfiction, call it a thesis, and everyone loves you. At worst, it's cowardice, taking the wonder and beauty of story and hiding it in an ivory tower where you don't have to engage with anyone, save those young minds too terrified to show you that maybe Jane Austen wasn't the end of literature. Then again, I may not know. I had very limited access to my professors. They were too busy reading Bronte to comment).

LFC, and a Mild Promo

So, gotta admit. I'm kind of a loner.

Not the cool kind of loner that you want to know, the one with the bike and the leather jacket who just needs a hug or something. Nah, the other kind, the nerd kid who sits in the corner reading. Because stories about Buddhist ghosts setting Catholic nuns on fire just makes more sense to me than the real world.

The Cool Loner

Yours Truly

When you live in that kind solitude, it informs a lot about what you do. That's especially true with regard to how you train. I'm often left to my own devices to determine not only how to train, but also how to eat to fuel that training.

And if you're good at it, you should ultimately be able to prove it, not only in terms of your capabilities but also in terms of your 'look.' Athletic capability does not, or should not, coincide with a paunch. I mean, okay, you'll see marathon runners with some extra on the belly, but that's a cortisol/hormonal-stress issue that they don't mind anyway (it's just one more reason to not worry about getting good at running all the miles).

I'm a martial artist. Martial arts are a hybrid form of athletic discipline. You need to be strong, yes, but you also need to be able to fight for a long time without getting 'gassed,' as they say. It's a balancing trick, and it doesn't help any that the things you use to train those qualities both require different kinds of fueling to work.

Honestly, I don't think I'm very good at it.

Why not?

Well, because I can't seem to find the balance between one kind of training and the other. I can do more push ups and pull ups than I used to, but I can't do as many as I think I can. I can run nine sprints in ten minutes at the end of a hard hour's workout, up a freaking hill and everything. And I'm carrying a belly.

It shouldn't matter, but it does to me, and I don't know how to be okay with the dissonance between what I can do and what I look like.

All my study, all my knowledge, all my practice, and I still haven't solved the problem. And as I reflect on it, I think I'm probably too close to see the answer. So I've decided to follow the coach's tip and find a coach of my own.

Now, obviously, I'm too poor to actually find someone to coach me. But good coaches have a tendency to create programs that work. More importantly, they tend to be good at diagnosing which problems you have and which programs will work to solve them.

It's tricky, in my case, because my great enthusiasm is for body weight work - harder versions of push ups and pull ups and things like that. Because it doesn't involve (much) equipment, there's not a lot of research done into figuring out how diet works with it, whether you should be high-carb or low-carb or anything like that. (Can't sell a machine to a guy who doesn't need it).

But I found a gent and I've started talking to him. No idea what will happen. Don't see how it can hurt, though.

(By the way, if you're wanting more about ghosts and nuns and the like, you should check out this story by Lauren Harris. Good stuff).

The First Step is the Hardest

So, I guess I have a blog.

Haven't had one of those in a really long time. I got started on Livejournal, because I made some really cool friends, but came to realize it wasn't quite my scene. Nothing against spinster women who love their cats so hard, but there's just not a lot of conversation to be had there for a guy.

Not for me, anyway.

I told myself I'd never really come back to it. I had too much to do in terms of the important things. You know. The Next Great American Novel and all that. All writers are obligated to write the Next Great Something. Write it, but never finish it. That's what makes us fun to talk to at parties.

The thing is, though, that when the deadline was passed to me, it was passed to me along with mandatory waiting times. And so, I find myself now with extra time. Obviously, I can't not write. I gotta do something to keep my hands moving, but I've got so many created things that I haven't really done anything with, and that's got to change. Making more stories is a shitty move when I've got stories in the pipe that need to be submitted.

So, here I am. Writing about not writing and turning to writing to keep from writing.

You probably wonder why I named this blog The Fit Writer. We have established that I am a writer, or at the very least that I have some words that I can't say any other way. So where do I get off saying that I'm fit?

Fit for what? What does fit mean?

Well, for me, it's the physical journey. I want to grow in my strength and general capability. Because strong people are generally more capable, and sexy as hell. I want that.

Am I there yet?

Well, once upon a time, I couldn't do push ups. I couldn't do pull ups. I couldn't run a mile. I can do those things now, but getting there has shown me so much more that's out there that I want to do.

They say that, if you're a male, your best strength days are when you're in your early 20s, and it's all downhill from there.

I will make them choke on those words, and I mean to share that journey with you. And maybe turn a phrase or two along the way.

So. Here I go.