The Assessment

“You’re going to be alright,” said the voice above me.  I wasn’t so sure.  In my opinion, I was about a mile away from alright.

I was focusing on breathing.  Was it in through the nose and out through the mouth, or in through the mouth and out through the nose?  Either way seemed like a stupid idea. Screw it! I’m going to breathe in through my nose and mouth and out through my nose and mouth.  That made sense to me.  Get as much of the precious oxygen into my lungs as possible.

Flat on my back, sucking in gulps of air that felt as if they were just out of reach, I saw the dull haze of industrial fluorescent lights on the ceiling.  They pulsed along to the rhythm of my quick heartbeat amidst the tiny flashes of fireworks popping all around my field of vision.  The volcano in my stomach, threatening to erupt in vomit all over myself began to subside, but at that point, lying on my back on the gymnasium floor, I was preparing my soul for its trip into the unknown.

As the voice above me continued to talk me through this humiliating moment in my life, I saw quick flashes of everything that had brought me to this point.

Three weeks earlier, I was beginning to drift off to sleep when my wife, Wendy, put her phone down and quickly turned her body to face mine in the darkness.  “You’re going to die,” she said to me with a seriousness reserved only for the milliseconds before I fall asleep.  “You’re going to die, and leave Zach and me alone.”

“You won’t be alone,” I replied casually, “You’re attractive enough, you’ll have lots of options,” hoping this would be the end of it if she laughed, but I knew this wouldn’t be the case.  The words out of Wendy’s mouth were too clear and lucid for this to be the end of the conversation.

“I mean it Steve,” she pressed on, “You’ve gained too much weight again and you are going to die if you don’t do something about this.”

Wendy was absolutely correct.  In the last year, I had lost and then gained back about the equivalent of a cocker spaniel.  If I didn’t change something, I was heading into gaining as much as a corgi or English setter.  The good news, was that I had run out of excuses and now felt good enough to make the changes necessary to lose the spaniel and then maybe go so far as lose as much as a Scottish terrier or maybe even a blue healer.

Since we had moved to Olympia, Washington from Lawrence, Kansas, I had found it difficult to keep up with my very effective exercise routine I had stuck to out in the middle of the country.  My activity had fallen off when we got the word in mid-November that we would be leaving Kansas to move back to Washington.  Exercise time made way for packing up, cleaning, errands and trips to Goodwill with donations.

It was a stressful time too.  I was still fishing for a job either in Kansas or back in Seattle.  Kansas didn’t seem to want me because I would be heading back to Washington soon, and Seattle wasn’t interested because I was still out in Kansas.  My diet started slipping into the part of the food pyramid that actually lies outside of the diagram.  All my old favorites were welcoming me back.  Meat, candy, soda and carbohydrates all gathered around me with big hugs to get me through the mounting stress of moving.

“You look thirsty Steve-O!” said Soda, “have a drink of me and relax for a while.”

“Hey Steve, remember me?” asked Carbohydrates, “I’m at the donut shop within two blocks of your house.  You know, if you walk here and back you’ll probably be able to burn off more than a couple donuts.”  His logic seemed sound.

This slippage compounded with the wonders of multiple Thanksgiving dinners with night after night of leftovers, had made quickly made me too pudgy for my new medium sized clothes.  Holiday candy and cookies, moved me up yet another size in the week prior to Christmas, which was the week we piled into the cars and made the three day road trip back to Washington State.  There’s not a lot of kale in road food.

Before this turn of events, I had worked hard on my diet and exercise.  I was starting to look decent in a shirt and I was getting muscle tone that I hadn’t had before.  In the year prior, I had belonged to three different gymnasiums and got my value out of all three of them.  I woke up at 5:30 in the morning to swim laps at the Olympic sized indoor pool in Lawrence.  I was doing it, I really was.

But now months later full of sweet and savory foods and little to no exercise had turned me back into a portly pudge.

However, change is constant and before long, I had a great job, new hope and support to do whatever it takes to drop the weight again and start working my way back to those medium shirts.

The family joined a fantastic gymnasium in Olympia and we all started hitting it hard as a family.  I was getting back into an exercise groove and in only a couple of days, had put my bad food habit friends on a train out of town.  No more overwhelming cravings, and replaced them with the urge to go do a few miles at the gym.  I started swimming again and working on my weight training.  I checked out new workouts in Men’s Journal (not to be confused with Men’s Health, let’s not go crazy now).  I felt great again.

As part of the gym membership, we were each offered a free “fitness assessment” by one of the facility’s ultra-lean, super-duper positive physical trainers.

They asked us if we would be interested in doing the assessment together as a family.

“Yes, sure!” said my wife as she turned her head to look at me.

At the exact same time, I gave my answer, perhaps a little too loudly, “absolutely not!”

Wendy loves to exercise together as a family.  She loves it. Of course she does, she’s in excellent shape and has been her entire life.  Wendy was healthier than me while eight months pregnant and on bed-rest than I have been since I was the age of never.  I have never been healthier than my wife.  If Wendy were to die, and be in the ground with me crying over her grave, she would still be medically in better shape than I would be.

Five or six weeks before joining the gym, I had decided to go for a jog on one of the only Saturdays that had no rain in Olympia.  Wendy immediately thought it would be a great idea for her to come along with Zach riding his bike behind and our eleven-year-old wiener dog Gracie running alongside us on a leash.

I will run next to Wendy on a treadmill.  I’m fine with that, because we can stick together and still run at our own pace.  Running with her in the real world is a nightmare for me.  I can’t keep up even to the end of our driveway, which at our current home is almost 25 feet.  It’s embarrassing, I am humiliated and it makes me not want to run at all.  It’s not about outrunning my wife.  It isn’t about being a man.  It is about taking a solo experience that is always positive because I feel like I’m getting some great exercise, and measuring my output next to the impossible standard that is my wife.

“No, I think I would rather go alone,” I stated to Wendy in a tone that should have reminded her that we never run together because I hate it.

“It’ll be fine,” Wendy said as she put on her shoes and motioned Zach to go get his bike.

“Uh, I really would prefer to run by myself.  I don’t want to hold either of you up,” which is true.

“It’ll be okay, Zach will be on a bike,” she said, as if that was what I meant.

“No, I really don’t want to go with you guys.  I want to do this alone,” I wondered if she could detect the panic in my voice.

“We’ll go slow,” she said with finality.

“Great! Let’s go!” I said with sarcastic enthusiasm.  I steeled myself for a humiliating experience.  Sometimes everyone needs a refresher course on why we shouldn’t run together.

We took off from the house as a group, Zach leading the way on his bicycle.  “Zach, remember, we are going slow,” Wendy explained.

We started at about twice my normal jogging speed.  I immediately started doing the math in my head.  If we maintained this pace all the way to the end of the block, I was concerned that I may not be able to breathe.  At the end of the street, my math checked out.  Wendy looked at me and smiled.  She wasn’t breaking a sweat.  Clearly, she was enjoying herself.  I returned her smile with the widest, open teethed grin I could manage, to mask my frustration and also to try to pull in some extra oxygen.  We weren’t slowing down.

About three-hundred yards later, I started to lag behind.  Zach, who was ahead of us on his bike, stopped to look back at us. Wendy had turned around and was running backward just ahead of me to ask me if I was alright.  She does this quite a bit when we run together.  She’s bounding circles around me like a Jack Russell terrier, giving me what she believes are words of encouragement; all the while, I appear to be zombie-lurching down the sidewalk as if I was chasing a mirage up a sand dune in the Sahara desert.  We caught up to Zach, who again began to pedal out in front of us.

My son may hold the belief that the only thing that keeps his two-wheeled bike balanced while he rides is a steady stream of words coming out of his mouth.  Perhaps he fears that if he stops talking, the bike would simply fall over and dump him in the street.  I hold this belief because since the first pump of his pedal, he had not stopped talking in a stream of conscious manner about any and all things that popped into his head.  He had statements, then unrelated questions that made way for songs, observations about cartoons he liked and testimonials of which superhero has the most power.

By the half mile mark, at a pace double my usual, the only words echoing through my head are too inappropriate to print here.  They were inventive combinations yes, but extremely inappropriate.  They were the opposite answers to the one’s I was nodding to her in response to questions she was asking about me being okay.  Sweat is in my eyes, and I swear, the wiener dog looked up at me condescendingly.

It was about that time I heard my son ask me a question that I couldn’t hear over my desperate breathing.  It was something innocent and sweet I presume, possible about wanting to spend time with me later, or if he might be able to grow up to be as strong as me someday.  I will never know what he asked me.  I was seriously concentrating on moving my sluggish body forward at a pace that wouldn’t make my wife call an ambulance.  As soon as his distracting question was finished, I answered in a way I’m ashamed of today.

“Zach, YOU GOTTA SHUT UP!” I burst out, immediately regretting my decision.

Wendy and Zach stopped.  Even the wiener dog glared up at me, somehow sensing what a horrible jerk I was.  Wendy, who despite running next to a seething cauldron of asthmatic anger, had been having a good time up until I barked those words.  The mood had changed instantly, and rightly so.  I deserved the scorn and then some.

Even though I panted several heartfelt apologies, they weren’t enough to dry all the tears my son was trying to keep from leaking out of his eyes.  He probably forgives me, but I sure don’t forgive myself.

I felt like that little family run was even a little worse than I thought it would be.  We haven’t done one since.

That brings us back to the fitness assessment at the new gym.  Wendy only asked one more time to do the fitness test together, and then she got the message that I would prefer to be physically humiliated in a one-on-one scenario with the trainer.

I only had to reschedule the assessment once, and I knew I had to get it done, so after two weeks of me going to the gym nearly every day, it was time to face the music.  I felt confident that my work in the gym had moved the needle on my health at least a little.  I felt stronger.  Still, I was nervous about meeting with the trainer.

The tests, weren’t exactly feats of strength.  We didn’t go out in the nearby woods and have me lift tree logs, or pull a small airplane down a runway with my teeth.  I probably could have done those.  Instead, Danny the trainer measured how long I could sit against a wall, how many pushups I could do and my heart rate after walking up stairs to a metronome.  He took my actual measurements with a tape and then came the body fat measurement.

This is the test that I just plain disagree with.  It wasn’t done with calipers and math, like they used to do it.  Instead, Danny pulled out a device and pushed some buttons on it.  It may or may not have sounded like a Simon game.  I may have heard those noises in my head because of how skeptical I was of this next test.

“What the hell is that Danny, an E-meter?” I asked.

“What’s an E-meter?”

“From Scientology, it measures your energy and tells you how much money you need to pay the church to get better.”

“No, this measures body fat by sending an electric current through one hand and into your other, while measuring how much time it takes to get there.  Then it calculates how much body fat you have.”

“Yep, that’s pretty much like an E-meter.”

“It just measures your fat.”

When it gave me the number I definitely thought it was an E-meter.  Danny just said, “Well, it’s a baseline.  We’ll get to where you want it to be.”

That was a pretty bold statement.  I liked this kid, but I didn’t want to be the guy who took his innocence away.

We ran through my other numbers:

Wall sit: Weak

Pulse after stairs: Too high

Push-ups: Borderline acceptable (I’ll take it!)

Flexibility: Poor

Body fat: Too much

I scheduled my first training appointment along with some rather ambitious goals right then and there.  I continued to hit the gym in the morning and evening when I could.

The night before my first training session I was excited and nervous.  I didn’t want Danny to yell at me as motivation.  I didn’t want to hear the macho, “PUSH IT! COME ON!”  I wanted nothing of that.  I thought about talking to Danny first about how I could be psychologically reinforced.

Maybe I could take in a bag of peanut butter cups—the mini ones, I know why I’m at the gym—and have him give me one after a set of crunches, or between individual push-ups.  I thought that wouldn’t fly and he would probably throw them away, despite me explaining to him that dark chocolate has many health benefits.

I showed up ready to pump iron and work hard.  I’d been curling the twenty-pound dumbbells for quite a while.  Perhaps he would move me to the thirties?  Maybe it would be a leg day and he would have me try to best my 300 pound personal record from high school. No. Instead Danny had me do an exercise in the middle of the gym floor that essentially simulated me sitting down in a chair and then standing back up again—easy enough.

Then Danny had me grab a mat from the wall and lay myself down on my back, lifting my head and extending my legs out together off the ground and flutter kick them.  I looked like I was doing a chorus girl dance routine by the edge of a swimming pool.  But at the twenty second mark, I wondered how much longer I would have to do them.

Then he had me use one leg at a time only and step up onto a box.  Were we not going to use any weights?  Was my health so bad that Danny felt he had to start me out on basic getting-around-the-house kind of exercises?  Sit in chair, kick my tight pants on and walk upstairs, seemed to be what I was learning to do.  It resembled more of a physical therapy session.  I wondered if he would have me pretend to open and shut a kitchen cabinet.

“Okay Steve, Open that cupboard and reach for the can, reach for the can and close the cupboard.  Five more.”

He had me do push-ups on a ball, which seemed legit.  Then we started the whole thing over.  The weird thing was that I was pretty winded and a little tired.

“Are you tired?” asked Danny.

“No,” I mouthed, “let’s go.”

“Maybe we should get you some water.”

“Okay,” and I went and downed a cup of water, then got back at it.

It happened after the second set of steps.  I was catching my breath and an urgency awakened in my stomach, the kind that makes you look for exits and bucket shaped containers.  Danny was in the middle of saying God-knows-what to me, but I couldn’t hear him over the bass drum thumping in my head.

I panicked a little trying to stay in control.  “I think I may vomit,” I said quickly and a little too loud.

Danny stopped whatever he was saying and gingerly took my elbow to help me to the floor.  “Take it easy and just lay down here on the mat.” Danny said, in a voice too calm for a guy about to get puked on, “Take a deep breath and let’s get those legs elevated.”

My face felt hot and I didn’t know what was going on around me.  Danny had moved the stepping box closer to my legs and then lifted my calves up onto the platform.  He placed my nasty, sweaty towel under my neck and it felt a little like I was at a spa, but I knew this wasn’t good.  I suppressed a contraction in my gut that typically meant the coming of a Technicolor yawn.  I willed it to stay down.

“You’re going to be alright,” said the voice, Danny’s voice.

The gym I was in is one of four exercise rooms that this facility has.  It’s the room closest to the front desk and on the way to the pool.  As you pass by it, you’re compelled to look inside and see how busy the place is and whether this will be the room you exercise in.  It’s the room that is directly across from the childcare facility.  It receives maximum traffic.  I was sure I was getting more than my share of odd looks.  I waited to hear if a young child would honestly ask their mother as they walked by, “Mommy, is that ugly pregnant lady about to have a baby at the gym?”  To which the mother would reply honestly, “I don’t know honey.”

I felt deflated.  Sitting in a chair, moving my legs back and forth and walking upstairs had defeated me.  I imagined at my next session Danny would hand me a Nerf ball about the size of a peach and say, “All right Steve, give me three good squeezes!”

“Does this happen often?” I asked Danny as I sat up.

“It happened to another guy I worked with.”

“Another guy” meant this only happened one other time.  I let Danny continue the story.

“He didn’t have anything for breakfast and his blood-sugar got too low and he puked,” Danny explained, foreshadowing his next question, “did you eat breakfast?”

“Yes I did,” I said.

“What did you have?”

“I had a handful of nuts.”  It didn’t sound stupid until after I said it.  Before I said it, it seemed perfectly reasonable that a handful of nuts would classify as a hearty and healthy meal.  However, a handful of nuts, does not a breakfast make.

“A handful of nuts?”

“Yes, a big handful of nuts,”

“Why did you only eat nuts for breakfast?”

“Nuts are the new thing.  Every health magazine and dietary doctor is saying we should be eating more nuts, because they are so good for you,” I started to get a little frustrated, “So this morning, instead of eating a bunch of carbs and fatty-cheesy, burrito-ish breakfast, I thought I was being healthy by having a small portion of nuts.”

“You need to eat more.”

“It’s that kind of thinking that got me in this mess in the first place.”

“Eat a good breakfast every day,” Danny said.  Sesame Street has a book that I read to Zach when he was three about the subject.  Now I know that nuts alone, don’t cut it.  You need something in your gut.

“Fine,” I said, “I’ll eat more than nuts. I feel like I’m ready to get back at it.” I wasn’t, but I was paying Danny something like $1.32 per minute, and vomit or not, I had already wasted $3.96 on this sad display of fitness failure.

“And don’t kick yourself about this.  It’s only your first workout.” Danny tried to comfort my bruised ego by reminding me I had never worked with a trainer before.  I took it a different way.

I took it to mean that he believed I had never worked hard or truly exercised before.  To me, it sounded as if he had classified everything I had done in the three gyms in the last year was just touring the facilities.  I was offended, and had I not been tired from all the exercise, I would have told him just how good I was at exercising, but instead I just looked at him as I mopped sweat off of my face and nodded a little…but not a lot.

We did finish the circuit and ended with a specific type of rowing on a weight machine.  This is to give the ego a feeling that something was accomplished other than simply bending my body at the knees and back several times and kicking my little legs out in front of me while laying down.

He gave me an exercise journal that we wrote down everything that we did and he showed me how to log more to show him my progress.  I thanked Danny for his time and told him I would see him next week.  He asked if I was sure.  I was, but come on man!

My plan was to go and do 50 more minutes of cardio after my workout, but instead I decided to collect my things from my locker and try to drive myself home.

I knew what was coming.  I was going to be very sore the next day.  But it was more than that.  When I woke up the next morning, it felt like my legs were duct taped straight.  My legs felt like they had undergone extensive, root-canal dental work done.  My legs felt like artists were blowing glass in my thighs.  My calves felt like five dwarves had surrounded each one with sledge hammers and they were all rhythmically bashing away at them.  My abs felt like the spirits of two dead boxers were punching me in the belly.  They felt like I had spent an afternoon standing three feet away from a baseball pitching machine set to “medium.” On top of that, it felt like a wiener dog was jumping on my stomach wanting to be let out to go to do its business. That last one turned out to be true.

I managed to make it through the day, knowing that in the morning, I would get up at 5:15 to head to the gym and try to recreate what Danny and I had done two days before.  I let Wendy know how sore I was all day, looking for a little compassion.

“Oh honey,” she said as she kissed me goodnight, “tomorrow is going to feel worse,” and that’s the Damm truth.