Self-isolation in the presence of adventurers.
When the world demands peak physical, the mind calls out for blood. Or something dramatic like that.
One of my greatest fears is going on a vacation with people I don’t know well, and finding out that all they want to do is hike and rip it on the trails when I’d rather go to a museum or bookshop.
This world values physical presence and appearance.
There’s some importance there, given that so much of life has moved online and become virtual. But the twist is different: we don’t value the physical body being in-person as much as we value how it looks and performs. We say ‘wellness’ and ‘health’ when we really mean getting skinny. We establish a variety of standards and numbers and treat people like lumps of meat on a scale that must be crammed into those numbers, whether by pill or surgery or injection, in order to be validated as a healthy, functioning human.
I’m short, fat, and it has always been so, relatively speaking. My friend and I joke about “the volcano” experience in Nicaragua, but it wasn’t really a joke. It has become a symbol of a pattern in my life.
“This is the f’n volcano all over again!” I yell when it happens again.
It was yet another experience of facing a physical body that wasn’t up to speed with those around me, literally, leaving me with the memory not of a fun vacation, but of gasping-out-of-breath catching up, barely able to enjoy the view at the top before I had to start back down.
If you know, you know.
Everyone goes far ahead, and you put all your energy into trying to catch them. Every ounce of your being is funneled into getting your head game right, pulling in oxygen, making shaky muscles move, and not crying. You turn the bend or come over a boulder and see that everyone has been sitting there, catching their breath while waiting for you for ten minutes. Once you appear, they proceed on, refreshed, forgetting that you, more than they, needed the break, leaving you with no chance for a break unless you purposefully decide to accept you will make the trek alone in order to not die of a heart attack.
It is a terrible thing, made worse when no one else in the group realizes what is happening, or cares to say, “Hey, I’ll sit here and wait with you.”
If you know, you know.
I struggle with loathing excessively athletic-fixated people for these reasons. Wardrobes made of Columbia and North Face; vocabulary and social media made up only of outdoorsy, athletic adventures. It is a game that seems—seems, mind you, but in truth this is not so—that is reserved only for a few.
Years ago, when I went hiking in Glacier National Park—yes, I do hike and enjoy it, but only with someone patient with my slow pace, red face, and need for breaks—I was pleased to see they’d created an accessible area for people in wheelchairs or unable to hike. They’d made it easy to get to a lovely little lake/pond and put a broad boardwalk trail around it. In the same vein, I like that they have a cog railway up to Pike’s Peak, and that there are gondola cars, roads, and other ways to reach beautiful natural spots around the world for people who can’t hike or climb.
I’ve heard some people gripe about it, as if you are not worthy of the view if you don’t get there the hard way. As if the simple fact of being human and created in the image of God isn’t enough to enjoy the rest of God’s creation. As if grace and mercy were only relegated to particular spiritual dimensions instead of a way of experiencing all of life. There’s a pride present, one that happens to all of us when we know what our gifts and skills are, a tendency to make what we are good at the thing that matters most in the human experience.
This strange physical fitness be-all-you-can-be-in-your-own-army mentality applied to everyone becomes, in a self-focused and narcissistic world, a choice between aloneness and isolation because you cannot keep up, and no one will lessen their own personal experience to wait for you, or a constant and exhausting struggle to sort of keep up and exist weary behind the curve. That is the choice: if no one will hold back and deny themselves the personal victory in order to encourage you.
Keep up and die, or stay alive and alone.
It is one reason I enjoyed martial arts—fencing, karate—because I did them on my own, without having to keep up with anyone else. My success and failure were mine; it was on my time and my pace. If I took a kick to the head, I would learn to duck next time. They were solitary physical activities, the only ones I could excel at on my own terms. I could kick and slash and stab people. I could use hands and feet and foils and sabers.
It took care of all the inner rage from years of team sports and trying to keep up and run 5Ks with people nagging me to go faster, and me burning through my reserves because I hooked myself to their pace instead of my own. It took care of the anger from the excessive focus on sports in high school, where there was no patience for non-athletes, other than relegation to the bench or teasing, but athletes who struggled with their minds and basic algebra were given lots of help to keep them eligible. It took care of the frustration of realizing that you never leave high school, no matter how old you get, because people live in their glory days, attitudes, and all.
Mostly, it’s fun to kick people.
My knees don’t allow such things anymore, but I’m glad I got it in during my 20s and 30s. I’m glad I broke a board and a few toes so that I can, in my mind, while smiling politely in my lumpy, low-cardio body listening to enthralling stories of people hiking up the sides of steep mountains and water skiing and mucking through a winter storm on the North Shore for funsies, and all of their vacation adventures, only to mostly respond with vacation stories of museums, coffee shops, s’mores around the campfire, and bookstores, envision a solid front snap kick to the chest to silence them (sorry, God) or holding onto the memory of taking a big, sweaty arrogant dude down to the mat and getting him to tap out as a justification for existing in this world of physical prowess only.
I have to remind myself we all find joy and pleasure in different activities, and to allow for different temperaments. But the die is so cast for physical skills and strength in our culture that simply accepting it as fair is not enough to keep it on an even keel, a balance of the athlete and the artistic or intellectual. The world has been weighted toward athleticism, sports, and how the physical body looks and performs. We have the Nobel and the Pulitzer, but we also have the Super Bowl, the Heisman, the Stanley Cup, the gold medals, and all the other athletic awards.
Nevertheless, there is good news for people like me, and it is that we are all dying.
My special power was always brains and various artistic and musical talents, but in the end, all the special powers we have—physical or intellectual—mellow with age into a mushy equilibrium. The physical body betrays us, despite our efforts. The mind forgets the activities of just a few hours ago. We grab at enjoyment where we can, and accept that our goal is to keep the physical body functioning so we can tie our shoes and walk downstairs in the house, not summit Mt. Rainier. The dudebro athlete trying to rip it like he did at age 30 while in his 60s spends a lot of time at physical therapy, the reward for his stubborn disembrace of reality. For some, severe physical illness or disability might make an athletic identity in youth a terrible burden and an identity crisis in later years. For others, it justifies doctors killing patients under the guise of medically assisted suicide; if the physical body isn’t peak, then be rid of it.
I remind myself often that the child prodigy is only amazing until everyone else inevitably catches up. Bad news for you: my slow, wheezing pace will be yours someday, but it’s what I’ve always known and had to accept, while it might be terribly difficult for someone in a new state of being. There is some irony that by the time we cross the finish line, if we do it in old age, we are mostly all at some comparable level of reduced performance.
Well, except Chuck Norris.