I Can't Believe I Became a Jock

Slight: That’s the word you would have used to describe me as a child, if you were a doctor, say, or a teacher. I was short—for years and years the second shortest in my class—and skinny, with curly dirty-blond hair and big eyes. I was energetic, a tree-climber, but uninterested in sports, either as a participant or a fan, and ridden with allergies that shaded into asthma. There were a couple of seasons of Saturday-morning soccer, a couple more of karate, but nothing stuck. The word you would have used to describe me as a child, if you were my classmate: Shrimp.

In junior high, I discovered skateboarding, and that set in stone my attitude toward athletics for the next decade: Thhhbbbbbbbffffttttt! As a skater, I might spend hours a day, every day, honing my sense of balance, building my endurance, inuring myself to the pain that came with falling repeatedly down flights of stairs onto filthy asphalt—yet never would I have described myself as an athlete. In fact, my skater friends and I would snicker at our classmates in their skintight football uniforms and running kit, which we dubbed D&Bs, cuz you could see their dick and balls, duh. Meanwhile, we proudly shrouded our bodies in the baggiest thrift-store pants we could shoplift. The cultural gulfs mapped out in 1980s high-school movies were unbridgeable, unavoidable facts of our lives.

And yet, as I write these words more than 30 years later, I’m planning to wake up the next morning well before 6 a.m. so I can meet my friends nearby and go running six or seven miles from Brooklyn to Manhattan, where we’re going to meet up with an even larger group to run a 5K shakeout in advance of the New York Marathon. The next day, I won’t be running that marathon, but I will be cheering on friends racing it—then meeting a whole different group of pals at the local climbing gym for a couple of hours clambering around on fake boulders until my hands are quivering, chalky claws. Apart from the race-related festivities, this is a completely typical weekend, the lead-in to (or capper of) a week filled with more running, more climbing, and maybe a day or two of core workouts and stretching.

Somehow, an enormous chunk of my life has become devoted to the kind of rigorous, structured physical activities I pooh-poohed in my youth. We go on family ski/snowboard trips in the winter; my wife, Jean, and I go hiking whenever possible; we take a certain pride in being able to haul heavy boxes—or, say, 50-pound pigs destined for the smoker—without strain. Good lord, we make the kids do Crossfit¹!

How Did It Come to This?

I know, objectively, it shouldn’t matter—that my experience is not unique, that a person’s leisure activities don’t have any essential meaning.

At the same time, I can’t escape the world I grew up in, where the barriers between skaters, jocks, nerds, and every other clique cliché felt as rigid as the concrete beneath my polyurethane wheels. It was never so much that you chose one side of the barrier or another—you wound up on one side whether you liked it or not. I skated, I did well in school, I was a four-eyed dorkbot, I couldn’t have been a jock if I’d wanted to.

And I grew up into the adult version of that! I was a writer—a soft, easy-living New York City travel writer, an overgrown kid whose main talent was telling fancy newspaper readers amusing stories about foreign countries and how to get good deals while blundering through them. I was a brain connected to fingers that tapped out pixelated phrases. And that was all I needed to be, all I still really need to be to survive in my world.

The shift from nerd to jock was so subtle I barely realized it was happening. When I moved to New York in 1998, my friend Tony Bui invited me to join a gym with him: Okay, I thought, I might want to start dating, and someone might eventually see this body of mine—some time at the gym couldn’t hurt. Before long, I was running regularly on a treadmill, and eventually outside. The skateboard—I still had a skateboard—wound up in a corner. Still, I wasn’t truly serious about any of this until my daughter Sasha was born, in 2008, and I suddenly felt that, for her sake, I needed to stay in shape and, you know, not suddenly die. Soon I was running more and more often, and assembling groups of friends who ran, and running to and from the office in the winter², and then somehow I was working for Runner’s World, and there were marathons and half-marathons and 5Ks and training programs and energy gels and all that shit.

Even so, running—and climbing, which I took up while recovering from a running injury—was merely something I did alongside everything else. But maybe five years ago, my relationship to exercise shifted: I began to look forward to the daily workouts with a new intensity. They were the reason I woke up, the focus of my day—no, the highlight of my day, the only thing I truly wanted to do during my waking hours. Forget work, forget meeting up with friends or cooking a nice dinner for my family. That hour or two every morning made all the difference, and once it was over, once I’d showered and dressed and had a snack, once the warm glow of pulsing blood subsided, the rest of the day felt meaningless, a stagnant block of time to endure before I could go to sleep and start over again. That’s not to say I took no pleasure in anything else, but nothing else ever measured up.

There Are So Many Reasons for This!

1. Endorphins, sure, whatever. I’m not really interested in the psychochemistry of exercise, but I think we all understand that, in some fundamental ways, exercise makes your brain feel good. Now give me the Nobel Prize.

2. The thing that is most amazing to me, still, after 25+ years of running and nearly a decade of climbing: I am not bad at these things! I can run… pretty well! I can climb… comfortably, if not impressively! I might even have some talent at these activities. Don’t get me wrong—I’m no late-blooming prodigy. I’m not about to win anything. I won’t set any records. I have no deep, coach-like wisdom to share. But I’m decent, solid, steadily improving, capable of occasional spurts of inspired action, and that alone would be enough to blow the mind of Teenage Matt. Please understand: I spent the first half of my life believing this slightly above-average level of fitness and activity was impossible for me. Not just unreachable but outside of my physical realm, in an another universe entirely. Other people could do it, other people were born to it, but not me. And yet I’ve managed to cross over, to defy any number of quantum laws, and become the bizarro version of myself: a goddamn jock.

3. And I did it too late! I’m 50 now, and while I haven’t truly slowed down, I’m constantly aware not just that time keeps on slipping away, and that one day my body will weaken, but that I’ve already wasted so much of my potential: What could I have done if I’d learned to run or climb as a teenager? Might I have had real talent that could have been developed? Could I at least have trained myself into a position well in advance of where I am now? Yes, I’m competitive, primarily with myself; I push as hard as I can in almost everything I do, and I’m addicted to the notion of progress, whether it’s writing or running or cooking or whatever. But that’s because I’ve always wanted to find out what’s possible, where things are going—I want to be surprised and fulfilled by the future. And now, with ever less future ahead of me every day, I am pushing myself ever harder in hopes of finding out not what could have been but what still could be.

4. Running is not writing: It’s worth noting that my increasing obsession with exercise dovetails nicely with my abandonment of professional writing. This is, I think, about fulfillment. The rewards of writing are slow to come, if at all. You spend weeks—months or years even—writing, editing, and publishing, the whole while hoping the world will take notice of your effort with reviews or retweets, likes and comments and “engagement,” sales and chatter. And sometimes you get nothing at all. Back in the heyday of my travel writing, the blogosphere reacted regularly to my articles, often with thoughtful criticism and appreciation. It was exciting to anticipate a reaction, to witness the Google Alerts roll in, to know that I had been read. Now the blogosphere is long gone, and social media’s interaction with journalism has withered, and what’s left? In other words, why shouldn’t I crave the immediate rewards of a long run, the high of sending a new climb? Why trade 90 minutes in Prospect Park for 90 minutes at the keyboard? Why wait in vain for validation when I can taste it in my sweat? I won’t wait, I can’t wait, I don’t have that much time. The writing, though—the writing can wait. I’ll always have time for that. Right?

Notes

1: They hate it, rightly.

2: One particularly cold and windy evening on the Brooklyn Bridge, I realized, halfway through, with mounting anxiety, that my running tights were far too thin to protect me properly. Reader, I want you to know: I came this close to freezing my dick off. It was then that in the back of my mind, Teenage Matt pointed at me, cackled, and shouted, “D&Bs!”