Fitness is a complex thing. It, at first, may seem pretty straight forward: our body is broken, in some way, and it needs to be fixed. We take it to the gym to 'fix it'. If we were to think about it for more than just a second, we would realize that it goes a little deeper. There is the physical, social, emotional, psychological and then there is the representative aspect of what fitness can be.
One of the things that we’ve always loved is that fitness is measurable. When you measure, you get a picture of exactly where you are. Exactly where you are right now. No justification for what once was (high school fitness) or where you could be "if this one thing happened" (unrealized future).
How much better would we be if we were to examine our lives that way? To verbalize exactly what we like and what we don’t like about ourselves in an objective way like we observed our fitness? (more on that next time...) How many times do we allow ourselves to be distracted by the influx of data to not really get down to the question of justifying our existence?
With our health as well as with our life, it’s easy to ignore the specifics of what we need. “oh man I need to get in shape” isn’t a plan.
Figuring out where we want to go (and exactly what has to happen for that to be true) means we make our conditions for failure clear & we don’t like to do that. If we keep everything in the fog we don’t know when we screw up (but really we still screw up, we don’t know it). If we make the conditions for success razor sharp we may fail, but we can set about to fix it (or change it).
If we lack something specific to direct us, we end up like a two year old: reactive to whatever comes our way. It’s one emotional distraction after another. Everything that we measure and track should be subordinate to another thing. “Yeah my 400 meter run time is important but not as important as me loosing weight” keeps you from having exercise ADHD.
The structure of what we track and measure should be subordinate to the highest order of what we are striving for.
So,
We need to know where we are. We need to know where we are going. We need to know how we are going to act to transform ourself into that.
