Knock On My Door

This is not theatre. Do your work, do what you must do to get through it, and know that each action leaves a mark. Enough marks paint a picture. A portrait of who you are and what you stand for.

The difference between the real thing and posers is simple. It is a choice. A history of choices executed over time. Your actions have consequences. What kind of mark do you want to leave?

Live deliberately. Train deliberately. Mark Twight.

Would you organise a weekly outdoor training session for people in your neighbourhood? I had to think about this, but, in the end, I decided I would not. If someone approached me and asked to train with me in my home gym, I would say yes. And, it would be a pretty enthusiastic yes. There’s a difference however, between someone taking the initiative and proactively searching out a training partner, and randoms turning up at a neighbourhood training session. To understand why, we have to go back in time to the early 1980’s when the Alpine Club of Canada ran sporadic mountain leadership conferences for Alpine Club members.

When I say sporadic, I mean, to my knowledge two. The first was before my time, the second was not really that good except that the final night of the conference featured Barry Blanchard giving a slide talk. Slide talks were a thing before YouTube. I remember the second conference, which I attended, had some “mountain dietitian” who spent an hour banging on about eating “complex carbohydrates” every two hours to fuel mountain activities. As if “complex carbohydrates” are not simply sugar, and, eating every two hours, whether it is a ten hour mountain day or a two week expedition is ridiculous. Better to follow Blanchard’s completely untutored advice which was to have a “triple bypass breakfast” at the early opening cafe before post-holing like a moose for two hours to gain the base of some far flung waterfall ice climb.

Anyway. I read the course notes for the previous conference to the one I attended and I can still remember the best article which tackled the thorny topic of whether outdoor clubs should try to increase their membership. The author (it could have been Murray Toft, but equally I could have that completely wrong – it was a couple of decades ago) stratified potential club members into five different categories. I think three would have done as categories one and two were similar as were three and four.

The easiest category to start with is category five. These are the people who will never join your neighbourhood training club no matter what. Categories three and four are people who are motivated in the short term often because they have friends who are involved, or neighbourhood training is trendy right now, or it’s the new year and getting fit is their new years resolution. Category three and four folks will hang around for a while but they’ll never step up and offer to train the group if you can’t make it, and, within a relatively short time period, they’ll get tired of neighbourhood training and drop out, or at least attend only infrequently.

Category one and two people are the folks who are highly self motivated. They will seek out opportunities to train in their neighbourhood. They are self-directed and self-educated and, to quote Mark Twight, will “Live deliberately” and “Train deliberately.” You don’t have to advertise to find these people because they will find you.

It’s a bit like inspiration, the motivation of strangers or even friends and acquaintances doesn’t really exist, although lots of people want to believe it does. People also want to believe the ‘rona wasn’t a lab leak and our regulatory agencies aren’t captured. It’s a nice idea, but it just doesn’t hold up in the real world. I train strength every third day; knock on my door if you want to join me.