When hard as fuck is also fun

On staying the course in fitness and in life

cringe but idc 😛

I was talking to a friend, we’ll call him Wolf, when out of the blue he said, I don’t really know how to have fun. Which made me wonder, really?

He’s a devoted jiu jitsu practitioner, is consistently in the gym lifting, and has recently taken up some strange sport he’s freakishly good at that involves target shooting, night vision goggles, and adjacently exploring abandoned mansions at midnight in the mountains of West Virginia.

After I pointed this out to him he reconsidered. Huh, maybe I actually am having fun.

Turns out he’s so engaged in the process that the fun doesn’t even register. And maybe it’s just the perception of these pursuits being “hard work” that makes the mind go… nah, you couldn’t possibly enjoy that!

Nodding your head yet?

Before we’ve engaged in an activity, especially one that seems challenging or uncomfortable, like lifting, ahem, it’s really freakin easy to judge it as not fun therefore I don’t wanna do it. And then never do it. Or try it once, confirm the this is hard and not fun bias and write it off forever.

Which brings me to the idea of adherence, which I and many others will argue is the number one most important thing in a fitness journey. Not those saved-but-never-actually-done swipe workouts on instagram. Not a daypass to the gym. Not going for a run one day (in the middle of the summer are you insane!? (yeah I don’t like running sue me) and deciding it was too annoying. A whole ass lifelong journey.

Adherence. Why would you adhere to something you hate?

Well the answer is you won’t. Which is why, when contemplating your fitness endeavors, it’s so important to consider whether you ENJOY the pursuit itself — or just the idea of what you’ll get from it.

But wait. You saw that thing on instagram about the 21 day shred that will get you fit just in time for the beach. Why don’t you just do that and surely it will propel you into fitness victory!

I mean you can, sure, but I doubt any extreme method will get you hooked for life. I doubt you’ll even make it through the 21 days.

Because in addition to your fitness choices being enjoyable, they also need to be flexible and realistic if you’re really gonna stick with them.

In 21 days, something is bound to set you off course, and then what? You skip a day. Then another. Then another. Until you write it off altogether. Yeah, that really wasn’t fun. AND I made no progress. I suck and this isn’t worth my time. Fuhhhckit.

The thing about fitness is that it tests you. The whole point is to challenge yourself, and in my opinion (and again, many others far more seasoned than I), learn to enjoy the challenge — the process — itself.

When I mental scroll through my fitness journey (which will be a whole epic post of its own) it might seem fragmented from the outside — I went from yoga to climbing to lifting to calisthenics back to lifting to dance to basically becoming a snake to remembering my forever love, lifting again. The connecting thread was always that I was deeply enjoying the process of what I was doing. Enjoying the learning process. The visceral challenge. The feeling of connecting with and strengthening my body. The burn. I was enjoying getting to know myself, my weaknesses, my triggers, my limits, the reasons I turned away from the heavy weights I loved most…

And most importantly, I was enjoying the process of becoming more disciplined in my pursuits of fitness so I could progress toward an ever-more focused, intrinsically motivated purpose. cus like I said. getting shredded for summer is cool and all. But an external motivation is not everlasting. It can help get you started, sure, but in the long run, you have to dig deeper within. Find your purpose, your why, your code. Find the place where your devotion, your desire, your discipline are lit on fire… so that even when it is hard as fuck, which it will be, you want to show up precisely because it’s hard as fuck. Because you know that ultimately, the enjoyment you cultivate from staying the course outweighs any fleeting thoughts toward the contrary.

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