Sap

In case you’ve been reading here less frequently than I have been contributing here at fa·ra·go, you may not know that, a couple months ago, I began working out with the P90X Program.

I started another blog to chronicle that adventure, so I won’t bore you with that here. You can go there to let me bore you with that.

Instead, I’ll bore you with more fa·ra·go-style boredom, though somewhat related to working out and physical fitness.

The other day I was mildly procrastinating the start of the day’s workout. I believe I was attending to that all-important task of lint extraction from the seams in my office chair, when the thought occurred to me, ”Wouldn’t it be nice to have someone to push me to work out?” I mean, Tony Horton, the workout maven in the P90X videos — even though he’s little more to me than an animated electronic flicker on my TV screen — keeps pushing me and encouraging me and praising me for such hard work during and after each workout. I need somebody — in the flesh or in the ether — prodding me and pushing me to get out of bed, to put on my workout clothes, and to tell me that investigating my Facebook friends’ new Facebook friends is NOT a necessary demand of my time.

And, in a brief flash, my mind fell back onto my “glory” days in the U. S. Air Force. Not to basic training where PT (physical training) seemed much less about fitness than about conformity, but to the tech school I was sent to a year and a half later, “en route” to my duty station in Germany. Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona, was, at that time, the training center for the Ground Launched Cruise Missile (GLCM, or, affectionately, “glickem”) program.

(During Desert Storm, and again during the unnecessary Iraq War, much to do was made of the Navy’s highly accurate “Tomahawk Cruise Missile,” launched from the decks of battleships in the Persian Gulf. The “Tomahawk” is the Navy’s sea-launched version of the BGM-109 cruise missile, and the same missile that the U.S. Air Force had in its arsenal during the late 1980s and into the ‘90s, only configured to be transported around in transporter-erector-launcher trucks, highly mobile and deployed stealthily throughout the pretty forests of Europe. The Air Force canceled the GLCM program in the mid-1990s, though I believe it still maintains the air-launched version.)

Upon the first day of training, we were informed that there would be PT every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning at 5:30am sharp. For most of us in the program, who had been out of basic training for up to several years, this marked a drastic change to what likely most had ever known. Five-thirty?! Were these people crazy?

And sure enough, that first Wednesday the NCO squad leaders in training with the rest of us walked through the dorm banging on doors at 5:00 to get everybody up and outside for PT.

It was early October. It was Tucson, otherwise known as The Desert. It was dark. And? It was chilly outside, one of the surprises of The Desert. One of the instructors met us outside the dorms, the NCOs formed us up, and we marched to the PT field. Where basic training had us working out on asphalt or concrete PT pads, this was literally a grass field, dusty and dirty.

Still in formation, we spread out uniformly across the field with enough space between each man to allow for proper exercise form. And then we met our Tormentor.

I don’t remember the man’s name. Or his rank. As a matter of fact, I never saw the man in uniform, in the classrooms, or anywhere else any other time on base, except on the PT field. I really don’t know. He seemed kind of fat, and pretty old to me. Of course, I was 21; 35 was “old” to me. This guy was probably no more than 45 or 50. He may have even been a retiree to whom they gave the privilege to work out with us. I wouldn’t be surprised if I learned that he was only 40. But he was “old.” And he was the leader of our PT.

We still worked out with conformity, each man doing the exercises to the same count and cadence as everyone else. But the odd thing was — at least to my experience, which had been in Basic Training that the Training Instructors simply walked around us grunting recruits during PT, barking orders and watching us grunt — this old guy who nobody ever saw away from the PT field, did every rep of every exercise with us! Every push-up, every jumping jack, every sit-up, every evil stretch he made us do, he did himself, too. And? He was always ready for more! Despite his apparent girth, he was tremendously fit and strong, and he put most of us young kids to shame.

And he got me into the best shape of my life. In Montana, my duty station before I was sent to Davis-Monthan, I had ballooned from my highest, fittest, basic training weight of 165 lbs. up to my highest (at that time), fattest (at that time) weight of 177! Within a couple of weeks, I was back down to 165, but with less fat and more muscle than I had ever seen on my body since I joined the Air Force!

So I thought about that guy the other day, and I wondered — as I always wonder when I think about someone who sped past my eyes in my youth — whatever became of him. If he was as old as 50 then, he’s pushing 75 now! I wonder if he’s still alive.

Of course, this does nothing for my motivation issue today. While it was a small slice of Hell to have someone pound on my door at 5:00 in the morning three times a week, it represented no real conviction or dedication on my part to the cause of my own fitness. But, in hindsight, it was certainly convenient! And, if I recall correctly, the rude awakenings stopped when we all proved we could show up downstairs in time for the march to the field. We were not raw recruits, after all. But even at that, I had the pressure of conformity, not to mention the sounds of the other guys milling about in the hall, getting ready, to get me to haul my ass out of bed.

Oh, Motivation! How are ye disguised today?



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