I'm 38 years old and other than a couple years of moderate weightlifting with friends in my early 20s, I have never regularly exercised.
This year, I was able to change that. Funny enough, I read "Shoe Dog" for the business story, but finished the book with an interest in running. I think it was just the enthusiasm and lifestyle of running that was pervasive throughout the book. However, I've attempted to get into running before, and it only lasted a couple weeks.
This time, I tried again, but as an old-ass man, my motivations have changed. I just want consistency. I don't have a vision of winning any races, doing 20-mile trail runs, or other big ambitions. I just want to not die of a heart attack when I'm 45. I want to be in generally decent shape.
Laugh if you want, but as a complete novice, ChatGPT set me up with some cushy running shoes (Brooks Glycerins) and a basic goal: run for 30 minutes and try to keep my heart rate between 130 and 160bpm. This is more of maintaining a metric rather than trying to hit a lofty goal. From day one, you can achieve this success metric. It means your getting some moderate cardio. I bought a chest-strap heart rate monitor and linked it to a free app (Heart Graph) on my phone.
I'm now 8 weeks in, and I'm dedicated to the habit more than any goal. I feel a lot better, and by avoiding over-exertion and frustration from too lofty of a goal, I'm able to stay consistent without feeling miserable. I'm able to enjoy the "runner's high" without the cramps and misery that I endured in past attempts.
This is the boring truth for health and fitness: It’s very easy to be top quintile in health and fitness by putting in very little effort. The only requirement is that you do it mostly consistently for a lot of years.
The people cycling between fad diets or doing bouts of extreme Crossift every several years until they get injured or lose motivation have a much harder time with health and fitness, despite putting a lot more pain and effort in during their bursts of activity.
One of my high school friends was always a little overweight and out of shape. Later he thinned out and got into decent shape. Everyone asked him what his secret was, but most people were disappointed with his answer: He said he stopped buying junk food and drink when he went grocery shopping and he started walking a little bit every day.
Everyone assumed he was on some intense diet or getting sweaty at the gym 4X per week. Instead, he was just consistent with good but low effort choices.
EDIT: This was pre-Ozempic. I’m sure today everyone would assume GLP-1 drugs.
A small amount of exercise daily, along with giving up sweetened drinks was successful for me (and for my friends who asked how I lost weight and kept it off).
In my opinion, how consistently you exercise is more important than how much you exercise, as you will naturally increase your endurance over time.
Learning to cook your own food from scratch is also an effective way to get excess sugar out of your diet.
I would say that portioning is super important as well. It is very easy if you don’t have calibrated brain to binge eat huge quantities of food while distracted.
Example you have an extra large bag of chips and you watch a show, likely you will finish before realizing. But if you just put in front of you a small plate of chips, you will likely not stand up to refill it while watching your show.
Add a bit of friction to eating more food. Brains are remarkably lazy.
> Everyone asked him what his secret was, but most people were disappointed with his answer
The comedian Jimmy Carr has a saying about this; Everyone's jealous of what you got, they're not jealous of how you got it. (NB: I've heard him say this, not sure if he originated it.)
Heart rate training is key for a smoother onboarding. Most beginners (myself included) simply try to do a pace that they simply can't sustain, think running is too hard, and then quit. Building that aerobic base is something I wish I understood far sooner.
This was exactly my experience years ago. I tried and failed to make a running habit several times until I got a heart monitor. When I finally did, I figured out that the pace I thought was what I “should” be running at was actually putting my heart at 185-190 and I was just getting wiped out after a mile or so.
Anyhow I just slowed down to keep my heart more like 140-160 and at the beginning I would even run three minutes and walk one, but I managed to get up to half marathon distance.
These days I don’t go all that far but I do about 3-4 miles 3 times a week. I don’t go very fast either but I feel healthier mentally and physically when I’m consistent.
Honestly it’s not clear to me that trying to go really far or fast is even all that healthy. It can actually lead to heart damage and it’s hard on your joints. Doing something more moderate seems like the sweet spot.
In the UK there is a program called couch to 5km. It's possible for anyone to follow and get to running for 30 minutes. It mostly emphasises running at a sustainable pace - even if that is just above walking.
It's amazing how adaptive the cardiovascular system can be when you focus on the right things and keep it very consistent.
I went from having a resting heart rate of 70-80bpm to the upper 30s with a rowing regimen. The positive effect this has on moment-to-moment existence is really hard to overstate.
That’s why most beginner programs state “you should be able to have a conversation” as the pace marker. You don’t need a watch or a fitness monitor - just to be able to say a sentence or two
Please don't consider 38 years of age "old." I just turned 48 and thanks to boxing 6x a week for a year I lost about 50 pounds. I now clock in at 6'1", 168 pounds and love to go shirtless at the local public pool. I look and feel the best I ever did in my entire life.
GSP’s trainer Firas Zahabi prescribes to this. I remember his mentioning this in a Rogan podcast. His philosophy to training is minimal to 0 pain/soreness.
Instead of doing pull ups till you drop start with 1 and do it daily. I started running after a long time. I’m 49. I work out with weights but needed mild cardio. I started with 0.25 m run / 0.25 m walk cadence. I can easily do that for 5-6 miles and keep my heart rate below 165.
Bottom line is - take it easy. The goal is to burn calories, stay mobile and not get injured or sore.
This realization was what finally allowed me to stop bouncing off exercise. The "no pain no gain" mindset of exercise was baked in and the result was years of smattering short burst of extreme exersion (1-2 weeks of running until my lungs hurt) between months of inactivity because being uncomfortable sucks and motivation is fleeting.
This time I started slow and consistent - run/walk three times per week without pushing myself until I was wheezing and hurting. Over time I got better and eventually I could just run for a while without feeling out of breath or painful.
At some point I actually started to enjoy it. Two years later, running is one of my main hobbies and I do it basically every day. I'll be running my second marathon in October.
I worked out half seriously for years and then fell off the first 10 years of having kids. I just couldn’t figure out how to balance it and being a dad. About 3 years ago I got back into it.
I was 245lbs at 6’1. Big frame but fat. My gym was near a college so just packed with people in their prime. I was able to get back to benching 315lb in the first year back. Set a goal of 405lbs and just been trudging on day by day for ~2 years. Hit it last month at 46 years old and 211lbs.
Just takes time.
In most gyms people start watching when someone unracks 315lb. I tried and failed at 405 4 times over 3 months before I got it. There is something odd feeling about failure in such a public setting. I can only imagine how a professional athlete feels and soldiers on.
ChatGPT and Claude are perfectly acceptable for this. I’ve used them along side my training plans in Runna as well as just getting some baseline for my progress in Golf.
I suppose I could be more charitable but I feel like title doesn't really match with the message of the blog. Otherwise I thoroughly enjoyed this feel-good story about persistence and micro-improvements. Most of us mortals aren't talented at everything and diligent practice is required for most of us to get better.
Yeah, somewhat relatedly… I think the real lesson (at least if you grew up near the coast) is that everything is hard for somebody. I can’t really think of a kayak as an easy-to-flip craft, but that doesn’t really matter for this person’s journey.
An extreme example, but: I used to watch this channel from a guy that built canoes and kayaks in both modern and traditional styles. He says in some videos that the traditional hunting kayaks are incredibly unstable and uncomfortable to use, because that instability granted them superior agility for hunting.
Sit ins are definitely easy to flip, but sit on tops aren't. Especially thin ones. They probably went for the thin, fast one instead of the wide, slow one while being naive to the implications.
kayaks are muchj tipier than canoes but shouldn't be flipping if you're just sitting in them, unless these are highly specialized racing kayaks, which are tougher to navigate.
The thing is a lot of what looks like a natural talent from the outside is also just learning on the inside. I won my provinces swimming competition without ever having swum in a competition before against swimmers who were all in a club. Reason: I grew up near a lake and was there every day during my whole childhood.
The thing is that people with "talent" are often just people who did what you're trying to do for fun their whole lifes. So talent then is just code for: "had a natural preference for doing it and both the means and time to do it".
Reminds me of when you introduce somebody to PIU/DDR for the first time. Everyone gets self-conscious for a few minutes until they realize that nobody cares.
Yeah, maybe the original message sort of got lost along the way. I think there is still some truth in the post when applied to the title.
I think one of the most important things I ever learned is that hard things take time. There is an obvious relationship between the effort required and the size of the undertaking, but also the worthiness of the effort. In other words: rarely, if ever, can you build great things in a short amount of time or with little effort.
And that's where this post makes sense: to build something great or to solve something hard, you have to show up every day and chip away at the problem, piece by piece. The progress will be slow and nearly invisible to you as you experience it, and is usually only clear in hindsight after a year or two (or more), when you can look back and see all that's changed -- hopefully for the better -- since you started.
I think it's more than just "hard things take time". The key sentence for me is this one:
> Kayaking taught me to be okay with repeatedly looking dumb in public.
I had the same thing when I first started running, in my early 50s. I'm sure I looked absolutely ridiculous. (I'm fairly sure I still do, I just stopped caring.) When I first started I would go out around 6am, partly because it was cooler but mostly so I wouldn't be seen. I've chatted to other runners who were the same, even keeping it secret from their family.
Getting over that has been a very positive change, and a generally-applicable one. I've just started blogging publicly, which would historically have triggered the same kind of looking-like-an-idiot phobias.
There was a post (maybe saw it here, maybe on Reddit) about sucking in public being a kind of moat for all sorts of interesting things. Crossing it gets you to places you otherwise couldn't go.
People can be easily overwhelmed by simple challenges. At some point everyone experiences this and we learn to overcome bigger challenges through life.
Another point that might apply is that OP probably has a high center of gravity which can make kayaking really challenging. They should probably clarify this.
There are things we can do that are externally valuable, and often that work is hard, but not necessarily so.
There is also stuff that is hard, but really has no value to anyone else in the world. I've found I do get enjoyment just in doing things that are hard, and often serve no purpose. For example, I learned how to solve the Rubik's Cube one day. Another time I learned to juggle. I learned to play the piano (OK, not really, I learned enough to learn like five pretty easy songs).
There is something that makes it more enjoyable to do something hard (for me) where if I accomplish it or not has no bearing on the world (even amongst my small circle -- except now they have to watch me solve the Cube in five minutes).
There is one challenge I will take on next -- to start a paragraph without the word "There".
The extreme version of that: "Embrace the Suck".[1] By a Navy SEAL with a masochistic streak. SEALs are selected for people who will keep going while suffering, but this guy is into the suffering as an end in itself.
The industrial version: "In Praise of Hard Industries".[2]
Having tried SOF selection myself (once, didn't get selected / quit before it was over), I can say that the selections are almost 100% designed to weed out people on their willpower, not physical strength. The people that aren't cut out physically, tend to be weeded out on the very first day.
And even if you get past the immediate pain stage, sooner or later you'll ask yourself "is this what I really want to do the next [N] years?".
The author sets the stage: uncoordinated and unathletic. Then they introduced their challenge: kayaking (or similar) which for them was a hard thing. Then they described the process: practice and improvement over a long period of time. And they closed with a personal success and take-away: it's worth the effort because of the experience regardless of the scale of the outcome.
I did a plastering course last winter and spring, and it reminded me about how, when you're young and in high school or college, you are continually confronted with not knowing things and not being able to do things that you would very much love to be able to do, and sometimes having to spend weeks or months without feeling much advancement before you suddenly "get it"... which is a kind of patience and stubbornness you rarely need once gainfully employed. It took months before I finished a wall that looked half decent, but then another month went by and suddenly everything had a mirror smooth finish. Your hands and arms and eyes notice things they didn't notice before. It reminded me that if you are willing to put in the hours, humans can do pretty amazing shit, and that you should never stop learning.
Readit News
This year, I was able to change that. Funny enough, I read "Shoe Dog" for the business story, but finished the book with an interest in running. I think it was just the enthusiasm and lifestyle of running that was pervasive throughout the book. However, I've attempted to get into running before, and it only lasted a couple weeks.
This time, I tried again, but as an old-ass man, my motivations have changed. I just want consistency. I don't have a vision of winning any races, doing 20-mile trail runs, or other big ambitions. I just want to not die of a heart attack when I'm 45. I want to be in generally decent shape.
Laugh if you want, but as a complete novice, ChatGPT set me up with some cushy running shoes (Brooks Glycerins) and a basic goal: run for 30 minutes and try to keep my heart rate between 130 and 160bpm. This is more of maintaining a metric rather than trying to hit a lofty goal. From day one, you can achieve this success metric. It means your getting some moderate cardio. I bought a chest-strap heart rate monitor and linked it to a free app (Heart Graph) on my phone.
I'm now 8 weeks in, and I'm dedicated to the habit more than any goal. I feel a lot better, and by avoiding over-exertion and frustration from too lofty of a goal, I'm able to stay consistent without feeling miserable. I'm able to enjoy the "runner's high" without the cramps and misery that I endured in past attempts.
The people cycling between fad diets or doing bouts of extreme Crossift every several years until they get injured or lose motivation have a much harder time with health and fitness, despite putting a lot more pain and effort in during their bursts of activity.
One of my high school friends was always a little overweight and out of shape. Later he thinned out and got into decent shape. Everyone asked him what his secret was, but most people were disappointed with his answer: He said he stopped buying junk food and drink when he went grocery shopping and he started walking a little bit every day.
Everyone assumed he was on some intense diet or getting sweaty at the gym 4X per week. Instead, he was just consistent with good but low effort choices.
EDIT: This was pre-Ozempic. I’m sure today everyone would assume GLP-1 drugs.
In my opinion, how consistently you exercise is more important than how much you exercise, as you will naturally increase your endurance over time.
Learning to cook your own food from scratch is also an effective way to get excess sugar out of your diet.
Example you have an extra large bag of chips and you watch a show, likely you will finish before realizing. But if you just put in front of you a small plate of chips, you will likely not stand up to refill it while watching your show.
Add a bit of friction to eating more food. Brains are remarkably lazy.
This is actually the boring truth about almost anything 'achievable' in life. Consistency beats everything else, hands down.
The comedian Jimmy Carr has a saying about this; Everyone's jealous of what you got, they're not jealous of how you got it. (NB: I've heard him say this, not sure if he originated it.)
Anyhow I just slowed down to keep my heart more like 140-160 and at the beginning I would even run three minutes and walk one, but I managed to get up to half marathon distance.
These days I don’t go all that far but I do about 3-4 miles 3 times a week. I don’t go very fast either but I feel healthier mentally and physically when I’m consistent.
Honestly it’s not clear to me that trying to go really far or fast is even all that healthy. It can actually lead to heart damage and it’s hard on your joints. Doing something more moderate seems like the sweet spot.
I went from having a resting heart rate of 70-80bpm to the upper 30s with a rowing regimen. The positive effect this has on moment-to-moment existence is really hard to overstate.
Instead of doing pull ups till you drop start with 1 and do it daily. I started running after a long time. I’m 49. I work out with weights but needed mild cardio. I started with 0.25 m run / 0.25 m walk cadence. I can easily do that for 5-6 miles and keep my heart rate below 165.
Bottom line is - take it easy. The goal is to burn calories, stay mobile and not get injured or sore.
This time I started slow and consistent - run/walk three times per week without pushing myself until I was wheezing and hurting. Over time I got better and eventually I could just run for a while without feeling out of breath or painful.
At some point I actually started to enjoy it. Two years later, running is one of my main hobbies and I do it basically every day. I'll be running my second marathon in October.
I was 245lbs at 6’1. Big frame but fat. My gym was near a college so just packed with people in their prime. I was able to get back to benching 315lb in the first year back. Set a goal of 405lbs and just been trudging on day by day for ~2 years. Hit it last month at 46 years old and 211lbs.
Just takes time.
In most gyms people start watching when someone unracks 315lb. I tried and failed at 405 4 times over 3 months before I got it. There is something odd feeling about failure in such a public setting. I can only imagine how a professional athlete feels and soldiers on.
For honesty, im also on steroids ;)
I normally start to wind down around 6pm, so around 8pm I close my computer and go for a walk. Come home and sleep.
An extreme example, but: I used to watch this channel from a guy that built canoes and kayaks in both modern and traditional styles. He says in some videos that the traditional hunting kayaks are incredibly unstable and uncomfortable to use, because that instability granted them superior agility for hunting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=DtnUq5v7cyw
The thing is that people with "talent" are often just people who did what you're trying to do for fun their whole lifes. So talent then is just code for: "had a natural preference for doing it and both the means and time to do it".
to be okay with repeatedly looking dumb in public
It is the same with going to the gym for the first time.
I think one of the most important things I ever learned is that hard things take time. There is an obvious relationship between the effort required and the size of the undertaking, but also the worthiness of the effort. In other words: rarely, if ever, can you build great things in a short amount of time or with little effort.
And that's where this post makes sense: to build something great or to solve something hard, you have to show up every day and chip away at the problem, piece by piece. The progress will be slow and nearly invisible to you as you experience it, and is usually only clear in hindsight after a year or two (or more), when you can look back and see all that's changed -- hopefully for the better -- since you started.
> Kayaking taught me to be okay with repeatedly looking dumb in public.
I had the same thing when I first started running, in my early 50s. I'm sure I looked absolutely ridiculous. (I'm fairly sure I still do, I just stopped caring.) When I first started I would go out around 6am, partly because it was cooler but mostly so I wouldn't be seen. I've chatted to other runners who were the same, even keeping it secret from their family.
Getting over that has been a very positive change, and a generally-applicable one. I've just started blogging publicly, which would historically have triggered the same kind of looking-like-an-idiot phobias.
There was a post (maybe saw it here, maybe on Reddit) about sucking in public being a kind of moat for all sorts of interesting things. Crossing it gets you to places you otherwise couldn't go.
Another point that might apply is that OP probably has a high center of gravity which can make kayaking really challenging. They should probably clarify this.
There is also stuff that is hard, but really has no value to anyone else in the world. I've found I do get enjoyment just in doing things that are hard, and often serve no purpose. For example, I learned how to solve the Rubik's Cube one day. Another time I learned to juggle. I learned to play the piano (OK, not really, I learned enough to learn like five pretty easy songs).
There is something that makes it more enjoyable to do something hard (for me) where if I accomplish it or not has no bearing on the world (even amongst my small circle -- except now they have to watch me solve the Cube in five minutes).
There is one challenge I will take on next -- to start a paragraph without the word "There".
Deleted Comment
The industrial version: "In Praise of Hard Industries".[2]
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Embrace-Suck-Navy-SEAL-Extraordinary/...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Praise-Hard-Industries-Manufacturing-...
And even if you get past the immediate pain stage, sooner or later you'll ask yourself "is this what I really want to do the next [N] years?".
The author sets the stage: uncoordinated and unathletic. Then they introduced their challenge: kayaking (or similar) which for them was a hard thing. Then they described the process: practice and improvement over a long period of time. And they closed with a personal success and take-away: it's worth the effort because of the experience regardless of the scale of the outcome.
Nice.
The last line hit hard. Need to remind myself of this sometimes
Deleted Comment