Is this my year of the body? I've been talking about this concept for I don't know how many years now, perhaps since I began college. The idea is simple: see how far I can push the limits of my physical performance in a years' time. I'm reaching the edge of my peak physical performance age and it's looking like a do or die decision. Also, this idea is supposed to precede my special forces training, since one needs to be in top physical condition to even stand a chance at being able to concentrate on learning the attendant skill sets. I know I'm not alone in the noble desire to test one's abilities (especially in the face of others), but it is a difficult set of challenges to assemble.

Now is a very interesting time for me to return to this idea, since I am indisputably in the worst shape of my life and have spent the last month of it completely sedentary. When I use that term here, I am taking it at its purest form. I wake up in the morning and move to another room where I turn on my laptop and begin the day with the New York Times. I stay within that room all day long, only moving around to see what other people are working on and only leaving the house twice for meals. I challenge even the worst American commuters to beat that! So, when one is at their lowest point, it seems poignant to dream about potential heights.

Still, the year of the body is a very ambiguous feat to accomplish. I don't know what starting dates or training programs might be appropriate. Last year around this time I set off in my car with a bunch of adventure sports gear trying to get that kind of gumption together. A month later, I was living a very similar lifestyle as now at the CS collective in Montreal. Granted, that was an incredibly high quality of living compared to where I am at now, but it was still sedentary. I remember finishing moving jobs almost every day of the week with my partner Jim late in the summer and stopping by the couchetarde for our celebratory liter of super strong unibrew beer. That got me fat too, but at least there was hard physical labor preceding the bad stuff.

I still have all my gear back in SF, minus the mountain bike I had stolen in the Mission ($220 loss). That includes rock climbing gear, a kayak, rollerblades, and my trail running shoes. I even have a national parks pass to complement them. So, as summer once again approaches, I wonder how I can carve out a way of living that would allow me to use all of then and keep working on my projects. I know I've whined about my lack of satellite Internet, but I don't think I can keep blaming that for my failure to stay out of doors more and keep my activity levels up. The more pressing issue, as I see it, is how I can work YouFitter into this idea. I can't be living in national parks all summer if I want to actively support the process of producing content for YF. Moreover, I am not sure that this process will require me to do too much physical activity anyway.

Look, I'll try to be realistic here. Unless I really take it to the extreme I had always hoped for, my goal really only requires a few hours of physical activity each day. Even if I did decide to devote more time to it, it would surely still leave enough time for other pursuits. Anyway, I am not really convinced that my levels of productivity are aided by spending most of my time sitting in front of computers. Like these blogs, good stuff comes in spurts and spending more time waiting for them doesn't increase their overall quantity and quality. So, I think this has helped me manage to eliminate yet another excuse that is keeping me from embarking down this path. Here's the plan. I spend a month in CA putting the initial content and structure of YouFitter in place. I spend the next month or so on tour, moving south by southwest, through various cities doing marketing and promotion. Then, once the ball is rolling on its own, I start disappearing for longer and longer stretches into the northern national parks, doing my own thing and trying to get ultra fit. Does anyone else hear the sound of Alaska? It sounds epic to me. Now, if I just didn't have to pay for gas...

My friend Mukesh told me today that I have “gained one round.” In local terms, this means that I have gained a size, which is to say more plainly that I am getting fat. While I have not yet verified this observation with a scale (I think I weighed 70 kilos before), I have been waiting for this to happen for years. I love looking at myself in mirrors, so one might have thought that I would have seen this coming, but slow and slight changes like are perceptually slippery. Perhaps I am less fat than soft, but the warning light is definitely on either way. I've been lucky to have made it this long living as I do. I am getting older and I have always known (without others telling me) that I generally eat more than most people my size. Only the genetic gifts of a fast metabolism and muscled physique have kept me from gaining weight. I lead a extremely sedentary lifestyle these days because I ride a motorcycle instead of a bicycle and I rarely find myself walking much more than a mile a day. Sometimes I do yoga and kickboxing calisthenics to break a good sweat before taking a cold shower, but as those of you who know me are well aware of, this doesn't happen every day.

I've never really been that active since I was a teenager when I was lifting weights and carrying lounge chairs up and down the beach all summer long. Last May's East Coast adventure sports trip was an exception to this, but a very short lived one. You may find that it is especially ironic that this has happened in the last few weeks (since I left vegan food and manual labor in the forest behind), when I have been busy trying to get a website for physical fitness up and running. Anyway, while this might have been inevitable, it is most certainly reversible. I have always prided myself on my claims to self discipline, but I really have not been put to the test very often. Try as I did in my early teens, I never could get myself addicted to any substances and I never could gain any weight. However, I generally took for granted the conventional wisdom that other people fell into these traps only partly because of genetic predisposition, but mostly because of a specific lack of knowledge in a few areas: the consumable substances in their environment, the effects of their daily lifestyle on their health and well being in the long run, and the perception of themselves and potential strength of their self-control mechanisms. I did a number of fasts when I was younger just to prove to myself that I could do food deprivation and understand its effects. I can do one again of course and surely drop a few pounds, but this will not solve the problem entirely.