So the gloves are off in the war against pre-middle aged spread. I’ve been kick boxing at Martial Way for about 3 weeks so far, and today I graduated. It’s a light-hearted and diverse crowd, and I can’t really speak for any of the other instructors, but Shannon seems to put fun in the heart of the class.
Compare that with one of the first martial artists I went to in Austin. I remember going to some 7 tiger-crane-monkey invisible hands kung fu class in Austin about 7 years ago, and I left thinking that the instructor was an ass-hat walking around with his colon wrapped around a broom pole. I don’t respond well to being treated like a 7 year old boy. I’m not sure that 7 year old boys do either. I wonder if the rigid discipline made him so unlikeable, or whether it was the fact that he himself had been roundly and thoroughly despised as perhaps a 7 year old boy, that he found the need to learn to kick ass so that he wouldn’t be resoundingly beaten at every conceivable opportunity.
So I get to kick women twice a week. I get to kick men too, don’t mistake me for a misogynist so soon. It’s just that if I’m beating wives, they’re not mine. Does that make me a wife-beater? I get my fair share of kickings too.
So, now I am almost fit. Having given up the booze for 94 days, I’m still taking the long way around to achieving fitness. I’m certainly not doing it the easy way – eating well and working out moderately. I’m eating gluttonously like an escapee from a gulag finding himself in a freight train full of Cadbury’s Creme Eggs on a week long trip to Mongolia. And kneeing pads like a madman, as though I’d been snorting Sudafed all morning to make up for the lack of vodka. And let’s face it, when you live in Austin Texas, it’s either the allergies or the side-effects of the decongestants that get you. I’m going to go down swinging, and possibly foaming and gnashing too.
So the path to fitness, which the chart on the wall of the Hancock 24 Hour Fitness tells me is present with a maximum body fat content of 17.0%, the path to fitness my friend, is an uphill battle. A stagger upwards along a rocky mountain path festooned with gateaux and chicken pot pies. If it wasn’t for the antler velvet, mixed liberally with pseudoephedrine and the like, I probably wouldn’t have made it to within 0.7% of my lack of fatness target of marginally fit.
17.7% body fat at last measurement – on the margins of healthy. Still 4.7% away from the far shores of athletic from whose other side I once paddled. I figure you probably have to give up the chocolate to get there, unless there’s some way of putting on so much muscle that you actually need the chocolate calories to get out of bed in the morning.
There’s an equilibrium in terms of effort I’m sure – where at some point it’s easier to stop eating sausages than it is to get up two hours earlier in the morning to cycle to Giddings and back. For now, sausages sounds pretty good. What’s the good of being Daley Thompson if you can’t have a box of French Fancies in a rain-swept Tesco car park here and there?