- You don’t complain about DOMS, so much as boast about them – Most people who do this won’t admit that they do it; everyone around you gets it, though, and wish you’d shut up about it. For you DOMS are no longer something to be feared, so much as they are a badge of honor! They tell you that you reached your limit and then pushed through it. Everyone else just thinks you’re some kind of masochist!
- You plan your meals around your workouts – You get up in the morning on the dot, consume a specific amount of protein combined with a specific amount of carbs, considering a specific time window before your scheduled workout; you’ve already planned your post-workout recovery meal – including the tiny reward you give yourself for good effort! You spend time calculating your meals on account of time-efficiency versus nutritional intake.
- Your friends hate eating out with you – You won’t eat in certain restaurants because you don’t want to load up on carbs – I mean, why can’t your friends get their heads around the concept of cheat days!? You’re fed up of trying to explain that you eat for function, and they’re fed up of asking when you stopped eating for fun. You hem and haw at their suggestions until they finally give up and say ‘you know what, you just pick a place to eat!’. They watch you in disbelief when you settle on a steak or roast chicken and vegetables while they wolf down a deep-dish pizza, wondering what the heck happened to their friend…
- You have playlists for specific workouts – You push to the very Limit of your physical endurance, and then your song comes on, and BAM! All those endorphins come rushing in, and you’re an animal again. So now you’ve got a playlist of all the songs that have that specific effect on your performance; you even have playlists for cardio, playlists for strength, etc. Your friends have noticed that your music all seems to involve heavy, aggressive percussion –but it’s ok, they’ve just added it to the growing list of crazy they now attribute to you…
- Your instinctive response to stress is to workout – A bad day at work isn’t cause to hit the town for all-night bender; it isn’t an excuse to sit on the couch, binge-watching Netflix while chomping on junk food; A bad day at work is an opportunity to you, because bad days means just that little bit extra motivation to unload all your inner rage as sweat! And no, most of your friends don’t have a clue what you’re talking about, and you internally smirk because they don’t get how good it actually feels to workout in response to stress!
- You suffer an existential crisis of identity when you miss a workout – you feel as though you owe it to your body to maintain consistency; it’s gotten so bad that when you miss one workout, you feel as though you don’t know who you are anymore. You go all-out at your next workout, and it just feels like sweet redemption.
- You acknowledge other fitness junkies in passing – You think we didn’t notice you as you walked past us in the street? That subtle nod of recognition from a complete stranger with the lean, wolf-like look on their face; you catch it, and it feels good – you’re one of us now!
- You subconsciously design your wardrobe around subtly hinting at your physical prowess – your choice of clothes had completely changed and you’re (apparently) the very last person to notice it. Baggy, frumpy tee shirts are a thing of the past. You didn’t ‘deliberately’ choose the shirt because the sleeves accentuated your new guns! It’s just a happy coincidence. Your friends are all rolled eyes and long sighs; but secretly they’re all jealous and you know it! When no one else is watching, they sneak over to you and ask what your ‘secret’ is.
- You spontaneously break into a posing routine whenever you see a full-length mirror – Admit it, you just can’t help yourself! It’s not just a passing glance! You didn’t just walk past that mirror; you strode by as though you owned it. You occasionally stop to strike a pose, twist to one side, get a better angle; and damn, you hadn’t noticed just how good you look these days!
- You actually get what people are talking about when they refer to ‘the zone’ – The most profound philosophical enigma of the age: what is ‘the zone’. But you know; you’ve been there! The zone is that magical place that straddles the line between all-out full throttle and total meltdown! It’s when you feel as though you’re no longer in total control, but you’ve never felt more powerful; as if your body has harnessed some kind of inner monster. It’s joy and anguish; it’s the sweetest kind of pain in the world. But try and explain any of that to someone who’s never been there. It’s a secret that you have access to, because no words can fairly describe what it is, and why you want to spend so much time there. It’s a secret that’s yours alone, but at the same time you share it with millions of people like you. You wonder why it took so long to find, and why you wasted so much time chasing substitutes for it. ‘The zone’ is a mighty divide; those who have crossed it never truly go back, and those who have never crossed it will never understand what’s so special on the other side.
by Arthur Rutt
