Getting Into the Fourth Best Shape of my Life

Let's start this story with an old advertising slogan. One that was popular when I was a youth and used to describe a product I enjoyed then and still do, and that slogan is, "Bigger is better." Where I heard it most was to describe professional wrestlers like Earthquake and Typhoon. It didn't matter that they were fat, they were bigger and that was better. My real idols at the time were Macho Man and Brett Hart. I enjoyed putting my four year old nephew in the Sharpshooter and running around the house in my underwear doing elbow drops off the back of the couch.

At that time I am going to say I was eight years old, and I wanted to be big. I made my mother buy me some dumbbells and I started lifting them as best I knew how. The next time I went to the doctor I asked him how best I should lift the weights. I figured if anyone was going to know about how to get big and strong it was the doctor, but instead of telling me to just work on running and body weight exercises while my body grew he told me to not lift weights until I was sixteen. With weightlifting suddenly taken off the table there was only one path left to me getting big, and that was cramming lots of food down my throat. This could have been done in a healthy manner as well but no one told me that one either.


My quest to get big started at eight years old and ended sometime around ninth grade. I never really got sloppy fat. I mostly just got big. I reached my adult height in eighth grade and topped out at around 180 pounds. It wasn't good weight but I also didn't look fat. My mother was someone always trying to lose weight. She was always on a diet and trying the newest workout trends and so she had this manual treadmill that was being used as a clothes rack. I decided I was tired of carrying around extra weight and throughout ninth grade I used that treadmill everyday.

Despite the fact that it was manual it was still loud and this was in a day and age before MP3s or even CD burning, but in our basement where the treadmill was we had a six CD changer. I would load it up with CDs and set it to random. I would also at times watch professional wrestling tapes or Saved by the Bell reruns. I started out using the treadmill for a half hour a day and then upped it to an hour eventually. I dropped from 180 pounds down to 150 and then I started wrestling. My wrestling weight ended up being 135 and my walking around weight at that time was around 140. In about a year I'd lost 40 pounds that at first I didn't even know I had to lose. I also happened to run a seven minute mile in ninth grade which is the best I'd ever done.

My Junior year of High School is when I started weight training and this is where I found myself. In sports heart is the point where the body can give no more and the mind forces it to. That is a point I found often in weight training. Coach Craig was known as a tough grader taking a class that should have been an easy A and making it hard work, and I rewarded him and myself with some of the hardest work I've done for anyone. I left everything of myself in that weight room every day and by the time High School was over I weighed 160 lbs and could bench 240, squat 315, and dead lift 405.

When I wrestled and as I graduated High School after weight training should be one the list of times I was in the best shape of my life, but I look at these moments as peaks, and every peak is followed by a valley. So while I graduated in good shape I wasn't at the best shape I would be. That would come at the end of that summer before I shipped off for college.

My friends and I had come up with a theory we named after the fictional character Roy Hobbs. The main point of the workout was to eat one giant meal a day after an extremely hard workout. If you don't feel like puking after a workout or a meal then you're doing it wrong was our motto, and it was to those extremes I pushed myself during that summer. I jumped from 160 lbs to 175, and as far as I could tell it was all muscle. It is almost sad looking back that I went to college with this much confidence and ruined it all so quickly.

My failings at Washington College is a story for another day, but its pertinence to this story is they had a bad weight room with bars that were too thin for my grip and I ended up with tendinitis in my wrists. My inability to workout may have had something to do with all that happened next or it could be for other reasons, but one way or another I called my mother while she was up for parents' weekend and told her I was coming home, this wasn't the place for me.

It all ended up being for the best but I was no longer working out. The thing that was most important to me before college was something I was no longer doing. In reality I'd lost a piece of myself at Washington College and it wouldn't be for another couple years that I would find it. I tried to go to NOVA but couldn't do that. I am really bad at doing homework at home, and then I applied to Bridgewater College.

For the second time in this post I will say that I once again found myself. I ended up rooming for an acquaintance from High School who would be my roommate for three years and a good friend for all those years until I had some other sort of trouble that he could have helped me out of an refused. Eventually my anger boiled over and I punched him in the face when he said $7.99 was too much to pay for a burger, but for our three years together at Bridgewater he was a great friend.

His first real act of friendship was when he tried to get me back into weightlifting. The football team had a better weight room than the rest of the school and he invited me to be his workout partner. As long as I was there with him I was allowed. It wasn't long until I found my old rhythm and felt like my old self, but for some reason I stopped going. I don't remember exactly why but I remember my roommate telling me one of the football coaches was impressed by my work ethic in the weight room and was wondering where I had been. I was probably hanging out with some girl that didn't like me all that much but for some reason tolerated having me around. That is typically how my relationships with females went in college.

Either way that wasn't when I came back to weightlifting at Bridgewater, but I would. I don't remember working out much my sophomore year, but i may have. The time I really remember isn't even at Bridgewater. The college finished a new workout building sometime in my sophomore year but like i said I don't remember if that is when I started back up, but my junior year I did. I would wake up at 6:00 AM lift weights, swim or run in the afternoon, and then go back to the gym for more cardio in the evening. I was getting back into great shape and lifting more than I'd ever had before. It was during this year that I first able to squat 500 lbs.

Again as I said I am going to count the peak as when I was in the best shape of my life, and this would be the time I was in the second best shape of my life. That summer I spent at Virginia Beach and worked out every day at Werring's Gym. Not only was I working out everyday I was eating the way you're supposed to. I would have a light breakfast in the morning, a can of tuna before working out, a can of tuna and a protein shake afterwards, and some kind of fresh fish for dinner all while drinking nothing but water. While I'd been around 170-180 since that summer after High School that summer I dropped down to 165 lbs.

I don't know if it was because of that weight loss or because my college roommate is a disgusting slob and visited me before my next valley, but for whatever reason I got very sick and weak at the end of that summer. It felt like I had a never ending cold and all my lifts dropped. I was nowhere near as strong as I was and perhaps I'd gotten too healthy. This would be the best shape of my life except I had no immune system and that has to be considered a part of health. I never stopped lifting this time, but I just wasn't lifting as much and couldn't get back to making gains.

It was during my senior year in college that a giant wall would be hit. I had the great idea to run around the campus and then go swimming. It sounds quite normal really. I was running quite often at this time and was enjoying running more than I'd ever had before. It shouldn't have been a difficult thing to do. The Bridgewater campus isn't that big after all, but as I was running I started to feel a sharp pain in my shins. I thought it was shin splits so I kept going. I wish I'd have stopped no because the damage I was about to do to myself has never been fixed. I'd been working out so much that my calves were exhausted. They stopped working and the front of the lower leg took over the burden and because it wasn't ready that muscle ended up tearing completely off the bone.

After that happened I stopped running, stopped lifting weights, and almost stopped working out, but I didn't. Instead of working out in a normal manner I started to do body weight exercises and hit the heavy bag that Bridgewater had for some reason. I did this every day and was able to maintain my weight right around 175, and that is where I was when I graduated college.

It would be a number of years until I reached the point where I was in the third best shape of my life. I will say I've belonged to three gyms since I've been back in Northern Virginia and they've all been too crowded. At Gold's and Lifetime Fitness I found it impossible to get a good workout due to the amount of people and the amount of time wasted waiting for equipment. It took an hour and a half to do a thirty minute workout and that is no good.

As I was finding out that those types of gyms didn't work for me I noticed boxing gyms starting to pop up in the area. I decided to try that and what I discovered in that trail class was that I needed that gym. I was so far from what I was that I had to do something and this is what I wanted to do. I worked hard at LA Boxing. Harder than I'd worked since High School weight training and I eventually ended up in the third best shape of my life. I was right around 200 pounds at this time as in my final years of weightlifting I'd gotten up to 195.

From my time at LA Boxing until now a lot has happened. I was at the third best shape of my life twice really. Once at the Chantilly LA Boxing and again at the Fairfax one, but I stopped going to both. Chantilly due to mind crushing traffic that pushed the travel time to that gym from 15 minutes to 50 and from the Fairfax one because I tore my rotator cuff around the same time that the company I worked for went out of business and I just didn't have the money to keep going to gyms.

That brings us to now. About five weeks ago it had been about a year and a half since I'd last stepped foot into LA Boxing and I was in the worst shape of my life. I don't know what clicked in me but I was tired of it and I wanted to get back to being myself. I downloaded the Fitness app on my Xbox and gave it a try. I did a couple of the ten minute workouts on the first couple days and they were tough. Then I did a longer workout and barely made it through it, but it sent the signal to me that I needed this.

During the first couple weeks I alternated between doing a ten minute workout one day and a longer one on the other day. Then on the third week I started doing the longer workout every day and a ten minute one in the afternoon and now as week six is beginning I've started doing one of the longer workouts in the morning and two of the ten minute ones in the afternoon.

I don't know exactly what I weigh or how much fat I've lost, but I can say that I both look and feel better and can fit into a belt I haven't been able to wear for years, even when I was working out at LA Boxing. I don't know where this is going to end but I am going to say when it does I will be in the fourth best shape of my life. As of right now I am scheduled to run in a Warrior Dash on May 10 and I should actually try running before then as I haven't been able to do it since my injury but I think I can get myself into it.

With not needing to go to a gym and having a workout always available to me I am hoping that this doesn't end this time. That I get into the fourth best shape of my life and that peak's valley is the slow and steady decline of aging instead of the sudden cliffs that have haunted me in the past. I am a better person when I'm working out. I am closer to myself than I am at other times in my life, and I am going to do everything I can to stay here this time.