The inner voice has a way of motivating

Decision time. It’s 9:30pm now and you thought you’d be stopped by 7:45. It was six degrees Celsius then and now it’s two degrees. You’re a little tired and you still have paperwork to do – not much but enough to make you a little more weary.

I get it. You’ve wanted to get outside to exercise a while ago, while you still felt vibrant and weren’t yawning. Now you have a choice to make: Do I still go for it despite the fact I’m nowhere near 100 percent? Should I do what I can, for as long as I can? Or do I pack it in and hope for a better day tomorrow?

You know that tomorrow might be just as busy and tiring as today was. Meanwhile, you have two hours before you need to sleep. You won’t sleep right now anyway. And you’ll feel much better if you get out there, start slowly and build momentum. You know it’s true. It happens every single damn time.

So, take a few minutes to relax and unwind from your long day of driving. Put those pain-in-the-ass dock workers out of your mind. Forget about all the drivers that cut you off, failed to use their turn signal and drove without their lights on.

Dust your dash if it will make you feel better for tomorrow. Vacuum the floor or your seat if you like. You know you like the cab super clean, and that’s okay. But consider putting the paperwork off until morning.

Done! See how easy that was. Now get your workout clothes out of your duffel bag and put them on. In the meantime, don’t psyche yourself out by thinking. Thinking means second-guessing your choice to get outside and do it. This isn’t about thinking. It’s about preparing and doing.

You’ve got the quick-dry clothes on now, plus a fleece and outer shell, and running shoes. Now roll up your pant legs and slide on the knee wraps. You’re no longer a young man with fresh cartilage, but the joints are still working fine. Once they’re protected and stretched you don’t need to worry about them.

Now grab the wireless headphones and consider which music playlist you want. Cue up a couple mid-tempo tunes to start before you go for the hard-driving gusto: Highway to Hell, Badlands, Lose Yourself. Gonna Fly Now is always there is you need the extra push.

The monster needs to come out

No more Mr. team player for now. Forget about saying and doing all the right things. That’s for the working hours. To hell with all the Trump signs you saw today. Screw all the social media posts you scrolled through that pissed you off. Fuck the world and all the bullshit in it. This is about you, getting in the zone, feeling the rush, letting go of all the pent-up energy.

Just get warmed up and start the jumping jacks. Then get the work gloves on and get down the ground for the first set of pushups. Now 100 air punches, concentrating on technique and full extension. You’re on your way. You don’t need me anymore.

Soon enough the three sets of jumping jacks and three sets of ten pushups are done. That last set was fun, right? You hope someone saw you do it, with your feet raised to the top step of your driver’s door. Seriously, how many other 50-year-olds can do that? You know the answer. It’s perilously close to zero.

Never forget the promise you made to yourself

The inner voice remains, for now…

Obviously, you’ll never fail to remember your most desperate years, when you were in the midst of your years-long long battle with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Living in your parents’ basement, 26 years old with no prospects of a successful adult life and no energy to make it happen. That shit is impossible to ever forget. It was before Kim came along, then marriage, then Ailsa, followed by the pothole-filled career path, followed by salvation.

You’ll also never forget the promise you made to yourself all those long years ago. The promise was utterly simple but packed with singular purpose: ‘When you can move, you will.’ It likely wasn’t those specific words. Hell, you can’t even recall the actual words. But the message was unmistakable: Always keep moving forward and never ever look back.

This means that these days, when you’re feeling tired, it’s no longer that kind of tired. When you’re not feeling well, you’re no longer sick in that way. When you think you can’t manage five more minutes, you know down deep inside that you can.

You always knew that somehow and some way that you were going to get over CFS. Now you know you can get through a 40-minute workout. It’s so freaking easy now. One set at a time, one workout at a time.

You don’t need a damn training partner. You ARE your own training partner. You have firm control over deciding what you’ll do and how long you’ll do it. In a time where so many people feel they have no control, you take it and run with it.

Look at what you’ve created already. Many years ago, you were a scrawny kid with solid legs but no upper body strength to speak of. You had a long neck and sloped shoulders. There was no athlete there. Certainly you didn’t see one in the mirror.

That was around the time when doing five full push-ups was impossible. Now you could get up in the middle of the night and do ten without even straining yourself.

When you get home, you’ll do your two weekend runs, because you can. You’ll run uphill because you can. You’ll sprint at the end of each run because you can. You’ll do the same next weekend because you can. It took years for you to build up to this level and now it’s easier just to do it than to sit and consider taking it easy for once.

You’ll stretch afterward because you can and because it all feels so damn good, despite the stiffness, the aging joints, the occasional tired day, the infrequent lack of motivation, and sporadic questioning: ‘Why do I put myself through all this?’

It’s all because you can, dummy.

A truck stop parking lot isn’t the best place for a workout

It’s not even in the top 100 places that I can think of. Consider the possible impediments: the wafting stench of diesel fuel; the ceaseless ear-rattling buzz of massive motors; semi-trucks driving by constantly and sometimes not slowly nor carefully; the uneven, cracked and pebble-coated pavement; and of course the weather.

Fortunately, the Carolina (both North and South) temperatures are mostly conducive to outside activity. But in the middle of summer it often stays above 25 Celsius until after 9pm. Since I hate working out in the heat, I rest and wait until then to begin.

On my short weeks, I’m sometimes halfway back to Canada on my workout days. In the winter, that means getting out and moving in temperatures approaching minus 10 Celsius. It’s doable because I’m just that crazy and dedicated. But let’s be serious: if it’s much frostier than that, I walk on the spot and stretch in the warmth of the truck, and wait until I’m back home the next evening.

I get looks from truckers when I’m working out. In my mind, most of these looks suggest the question ‘why the hell would you do that?’ I figure they’re asking it of themselves and the answer is a definitive ‘I wouldn’t.’ Their body shape and size matches that answer. A long walk would do them good. And I don’t mean walking to the store and back for a supersized Coke or coffee.

I can’t be too hard on them because I’m not exactly thin myself. Washboard abs are a distant dream. The reason may be genetics with perhaps a dash of chocolate addiction thrown in. But I counter that with the spirit of an Olympian, albeit an over-aged under-gifted Olympian.

That spirit has always been there

Back in junior high school gym class, after I had just run a hard 100-yard dash, a kid made fun of me and the gym teacher overheard it happen. He did exactly what a teacher should do when he turned to the kid and said, “If you tried half as hard as Erich, you could really be something.”

I used to think that trying is half the battle. But the older I get, the more I realize that without it, the battle is all but lost. With it, I’m always in the fight. And that’s the point. Always fighting; constantly feeling like I can still win.