COMMITMENT

by Johnny Nguyen

The word “commitment” is so powerful that people must step back and study it before they speak it. It is, for all intent and purpose, akin to a contract. And people get weird about signing contracts.

As all contracts should be, the contract between you and your fitness is a fair exchange. In exchange for your hard work and diligence, you receive greater fitness. The terms of the contract are clear: the harder you work, the greater the return. It is that simple. You can’t get a fairer contract than this.

But many people refuse to sign it. They don’t like the terms because hard work is involved, or they fear the contract because it is ultimately a commitment – that powerful force that induces the fear of failure. For these people it is more comfortable to hide among the sedentary, overweight majority who refuse to accept the commitment, the 60% of Americans who represent the norm in this country. This month Scott Kolasinski tells us in his article about what it means to be normal in America. It is a perspective that you’ll find interesting, perhaps a little offensive, but overall realistic.

Other people, for one special reason or another, successfully make the fitness commitment. We see many of these people every day at FIT. I cannot imagine what it is that motivates a person, year after year, two or three times a week, to interrupt the day and drive to the gym and walk through the front door for another tough training session. I can only attempt to explain such positive behavior as a complete and utter commitment to making a difference in personal health and fitness. These people have signed the contract with their own blood, because they are committed to looking and feeling great, prolonging their lives, and being around for their loved ones for as long as they can.

If you attended the recent 2nd annual fund-raising event called Fight Gone Bad, then you might have witnessed its participants bleed commitment through every pore as they fought madly for 17 minutes to raise money for prostate cancer research. Without a prior commitment to a regular exercise program, however, this event would have flat-out sent a participant home in a puke bucket. And if you participated in this event, then you probably know how close you came to going home in a puke bucket anyway, even though you trained for it. No doubt, it took a special commitment to go through Fight Gone Bad. This month Analisa shares her account of the very memorable fund-raising event in her article, Fight Gone Bad II: the Aftermath. Reading it may inspire you, as it does me, to train specifically for next year’s Fight Gone Bad. (Believe me, you may be recruited. Read her article to find out why.)

Thank you for reading our newsletter. We read things about health and fitness because we seek answers to questions we have, or in doing so we discover answers to questions we never even had. But, remember, the most important question remains: Was the contract signed with blood?