2018 Fragilista
This article talks about a personal anecdote about changes in my fitness life and how I think its affecting things and how I can better tackle it.
I attended a football training session at a fitness center the day before yesterday.
I had been going to this fitness center earlier before a stark 4 to 5 month break in between where I had no fitness whatsoever apart from the occasional weekend football game.
It was devastating.
Previously, I could expend over 4 hours of different intense workout at one go.
But I could barely move myself the other day.
My equivalent of Shuttle sprints were the next guy’s equivalent of jogging.
I really was trying, my body just couldn’t adapt.
Post the session
I realized, My previous perception of who I was, the mobility and fitness I bore before is a whole lot different than the fitness I saw that day.
I could barely drag myself across the pitch, much less do any pushing.
I realized that my fitness level had dropped insanely from before.
Why shouldn’t it ?
I worked off a desk, ate unhealthy food and did no exercise whatsoever.
My mental state had also changed, I felt less happy and the drive to improve just wasn’t there anymore.
This leaned over to my work and my personal state of being.
Beginning of 2017, I wanted to be the best possible version of me that I could ever be. That basically included, better fitness regime, acquire skills in the market that would lead me to getting a job, apply to MIT and then we’ll figure the rest out, is what I thought.
End of 2017, I was definitely in better shape, definitely had more skills than when I first started, applied to MIT and had a job as well.
Well, I literally had everything, everything I set off to accomplish.
I didn’t make it to MIT though;
Which now gives me more time to explore and learn which is a net upside.
Ultimately, I did not feed in new goals and targets, but rather became complacent.
I stopped going to the gym since I was now more fit.
I applied to MIT. Not getting in was depressing.
I stopped learning at the pace at which I was before, now that I now had a job.
Not to mention, my expenditure shot off the roof.
I was making more; I was certainly spending more.
Everything, I couldn’t afford before was now easily accessible.
I splurged. Now, I don’t remember most of what I spent it on.
I didn’t manage my capital properly.
Everything is getting out of hand,
This is not the way I intended it to be…
It sucks,
I am at an all time low.
I realize that having fixed targets imply that one will ultimately reach them; and quite similarly having unfixed ambiguous targets, mean that one will never successively reach them completely, but if they do work towards it, they’ll get closer and better, but never reach.
Going by this analogy, my takeaway is to set incremental goals leading to a bigger extending limit to things I want to improve in the long run.
Kinda like, if my fitness potential is a 100 (f(x))
Limit x tends to 100
I keep working on it, through 10, 20, 50, 90, 99, 99.9, 99.9999 and so on…
The pattern of improvement is key.
This will ensure that I keep improving and not be complacent due to achieving milestones.
This is good for learning, fitness and adaptation processes.
However, ambiguity does cause a lot of problems when other people are not on par or on the same page. In which case, expressing finite, achievable, determinate targets would be a lot helpful.
Sometimes, a merger between these two models can come handy to track improvement over a scale.
Fitnesswise,
I feel terrible.
I’m joining the gym today.
I don’t want to be back at this point, where I’m physically unfit ever in my life.
Learning wise, I am yet to design a strategy from my last year’s analysis to help me better tackle this problem and get more efficient in this process.
I’ll blog about it as I devise a concrete strategy to adopt.
Cheers!
