P, keeps pressing me to articulate the partners experience of breast cancer and chemotherapy. The other day I was having a wonderful conversation with a co-worker, a 20 year survivor of lymphoma. And, she has really taken a concern in my well-being, very sweet. The point however, was I mentioned that an essay was tumbling about in my thoughts about exercises that produce mental toughness, emotional resilience and spiritual alertness. In my conversation with M I wondered about partners, unlike me, who after dinner flick on the TV and zone out till bedtime, perhaps they get some golf in on the weekend. How do they handle the intensity of this experience? M pointed out that she had attended a support group during her treatment and that she saw a lot of families breaking up – that indeed the partners couldn’t handle the added stress.

There are certainly people who train longer and harder than I do, and, I salute them, my point in this is not to boast about that, but, rather to examine the unintended consequences, the side effects that exercise offers (or, perhaps, we have it backward and the muscular power is the side effect, rather the mental toughness is the sought after). P, was pressing me a bit last evening as she struggled to deal with her own lack of energy, and general malaise. She asked me how I kept going. I found myself calling upon the dead lift, and a statement that the yoga teacher makes regularly in class – to explain. Coach Glassman of CrossFit, prefers to call the dead lift, the “life lift” since it is such a fundamental movement, picking up a toddler, our car keys, or a bag of groceries. I’m a profoundly lazy man, and so, I look for efficiency in everything I do. The dead lift gives me more bang for my buck than many other movements. Really, if there is a weakness here it is that usually the lift is done with really heavy weights and hence gets done slowly. Its focus becomes strength, rather than power, but one can use lighter weights and jump, or pair it with something explosive, like dumbbell snatch and overcome that easily. To the point, P, said how do you keep going? And I slipped into a metaphor – I just squat down and grab the bar with my right hand, and then my left hand, and then keeping my back straight I stand up – simple, mostly.

Some days, I can do that a lot, others, not so much. But, using the words of the yoga teacher, “Just, observe what you can do, don’t judge it. Make a note of it and then get back to breathing, and working.” I had the concept before, just not the words, and so it is nice to have the words. Some days the emotions make it difficult to do anything let alone to work out, and on those days, I give myself double credit for attendance, but, I make certain that I’m in attendance. I don’t set high goals for those days, but I do try to make certain work gets done and I don’t beat myself up for what doesn’t get done. Mostly for me the emotion I’m experiencing is anxiety: too much energy to burn and no place to point it. I recall this summer waiting for test results and being so anxious, my bullshit meter was pegged. I asked my boss to please shelter me a bit, because, I knew that if some whiney, self-absorbed, dufus got past the safety barriers, I was going to rip their head off and shit down their neck – fairly anti-social — without context. My boss has been a dear about that. The gym is a place to pit that anxiety and aggression against inanimate and indifferent weights, and to re-create myself. The anxiety is probably the same as fight or flight, and remembering back to my friend M and her observation about couples breaking up I suspect the partner ended up with overwhelming flight response – nothing in their lives prepared them for it, nor did they have a way to convert it to fight and then to burn it up. I’m fortunate to have experiences with martial arts and in the gym that give my points of reference and words for what might otherwise just be an acid bath of emotion. Pick’n’um up and put’n ‘m down that’s how I get through.