When being told that it was unsustainable, I would respond, “It isn’t supposed to be,” before heading to the treadmill, finding my usual black mark on the wall, and staring at it for the next few hours while continuing on the usual uphill trudge. I began doing this after reading that a scientist could improve a marathoner’s running time without any sort of physical exercise involved. His method was to make them do mentally strenuous activity for hours on end, with no sort of entertainment. This forced a mental breakthrough by pushing them to priorly unknown limits. I knew my limits, and they were entirely insufficient for the task ahead of me: with only 13 days ahead, I had to cut 18 pounds to enter a weight class for a national Taekwondo tournament that I was already direly unqualified for. The captain said I stood no chance, and when he found out that I had to drop a weight class, he said I couldn’t do that either. Considering my current self, he was right, so I found that black mark on the wall and began staring at it, looking for a solution.
About an hour after hearing about my impending defeat, I picked up my phone to call my old friend, a former state wrestling champion. Being forced into whatever weight class his old teams needed, he knew how to cut weight; that, and he knew how to win when everyone told him he’d lose. He informed me that I would be eating as little as possible and spending hours doing cardio of my choice. The other option was to get massacred in front of my coach and a couple of thousand other people, so I obliged.
At this point, I knew three thing and sought to combine them:
- A boring, long, tedious task would help me to break a mental limit.
- Boring, long, tedious cardio would help me make weight (see where I’m going with this?).
- Mindfulness was good, I guess.
If you’re reasonable, then the first two ideas are already bad enough to stomach. It was definitely too much for me, which is why I decided I’d at least make the long, tedious task a theoretically productive one: mindfulness meditation on an uphill walk.
Since my breath was too labored, underneath the 18 pounds I was trying to say goodbye to, I picked a nice blemish on the wall to be the target of my mindfulness instead. From then on, accompanied by layers of my friends’ clothes to encourage sweat, zero music whatsoever, and whichever young lady was on the treadmill next to me, I would spend four hours a day staring at that black mark engraved on the wall from time past. Time kept passing, and I kept walking.
At the end of the first day, I was too tired to think beyond eating the one spoonful of peanut butter my wrestling friend gave me the go ahead to eat, and I passed out.
At the beginning of the second day, I ate one piece of caffeinated dark chocolate and got back to it.
Sometime on the third day, I got mad. Not even the luxury of “insane” mad, just plain upset. Turns out, the star player on our team decided to enter that weight class too, once again confirming that old theory that my face would be smashed in within a fortnight. Utterly discouraged, not knowing what to do, I did the only thing I knew I wouldn’t fail at: I went back to my little mark on the wall. He hadn’t betrayed me yet.
You remember when I said this wasn’t sustainable? It really wasn’t. Fourth day was the last day I did it, and I lost my mind. I mean, I was still on the damn treadmill for four hours a day, but in contrast to where it looked like this pro-mindfulness article was going, the only thing that changed is that I wasn’t doing anything near mindfulness anymore. As an alternative to staring at my lovely wall blemish, I was staring at Korean Dramas with beautiful men who had clearly already paid their treadmill dues.
As relatively luxurious as this sounds, it was awful. Worse. Way worse. For every mile that went by, my headspace got more clouded with thoughts of the foregone conclusion waiting for me. My roommate, bless his heart, was treated to a nightly podcast of me screaming in my sleep, far worse than usual (rest assured, there’s some PTSD to explain that one), and waking up to see me in the morning bath of my blood, sweat, and tears. That is not an idiom.
As you might suspect, that mindfulness stuff was actually doing a thing or two to keep me sane. Really good stuff, highly recommend it. That being said, it’s not something we usually do, and it’s not something that felt natural to me, even when I needed it the most. So I didn’t do it. I took what I thought was the easy way out and doused myself with entertainment until the last day of my sweaty hike.
Much to my captain’ chagrin, that day came sooner than expected. I cut the weight in 6 days, with a week left to spare before my public execution. To make it prettier for those tuning in, I spent the extra time I had getting used to my old kicks with the new, dilapidated body I had acquired. Blasting music from my neighbor’s favorite speaker, I did this for a few hours each day. For whatever reason, I found myself listening to the same album over and over again, finding new details each time. It felt a lot like the mindfulness that was keeping me sane before those handsome Korean men grabbed the baton from my headspace.
Fast forward, and I’ve been denied water for the past 24 hours to “double check” that I’m in my weight class. We’re in the car on our way to Virginia for the big fight, and they are driving slow as hell. They even stopped for pizza. Twice. They couldn’t leave me in the car, so I had to sit down with them and watch their jaws clench on my saving grace. Those satisfying ASMR noises haven’t been very interesting since then.
Eventually, in a galaxy far, far away, I find myself stripping in front of the judges, hopping on the scale, and getting the utterly unsurprising news that I was cleared to go out there and get my ass beat. I was even so fortunate as to meet the guy who would be given the honor: he laughed when he saw that I was the only person wearing a white belt. I couldn’t help but laugh too when I saw his coach pointing and laughing at me as well while his disciple was practicing some very fancy looking kicks to unleash on my sternum in the next five minutes.
The kid stepped onto the mat to see his opponent: a skeleton with a tall, elderly Asian man yelling some words of encouragement behind him. I was that skeleton. I heard the buzzer go off, and he came charging at me. It was time to see if I had broken that mental limit.
To this day, I cannot tell you the answer to that, but according to the video, my opponent got smashed into the next century. When I came back to my senses and watched the playback, I saw my arms blocking each of his moves, and swinging what was left of my meaty legs at him with no good intentions involved. The final score was 14 to 4, and the only thing I am certain of is that he felt every one of those points. The reason for that is that I completely blanked out. I was gone, back to zero. Formerly being of the belief that this state was reserved for death and the time machine back into my mum’s womb, I wondered how I tapped into such a state of nothingness. Where did I go, and how did I win?
To answer the first question, I went to the school dining hall, and immediately began putting those pounds back on. You don’t have to worry about the second question, because I definitely didn’t win again. As I said before, and I’ll happily say again, it was utterly unsustainable.
As sad as I am to ruin your exciting success story, I’m equally sad to admit that there will never be a charming, meteoric rise to success like that ending in actual success. It’s just a more refined plummet to the ground, with a nice midterm result to keep your interest. That being said, a condescending white kid did get his face smashed in, so I think we should still take the time to find out what did work in that story, and what didn’t.
The answer: mindfulness worked. The “rise and grind” YouTuber lifestyle finally did me some good. On the treadmill, it kept me sane. Training those kicks after I had lost the weight, taking an alternative approach to mindfulness helped me find joy where there shouldn’t have been any. In the ring, it helped my foot find that poor boy. In every part of this story that was even slightly compelling, mindfulness was there to urge it along; unfortunately, I couldn’t see that while I was in the thick of it. It could be that I wasn’t ambitious enough. Instead of striving to be the best martial artist I could be, I had withered myself to the point that I just wanted to make it into my weight class. I had traded my essential focus on breaking my limits for a new limit: just being good enough for the most immediate goal ahead of me. So I failed to be consistent, and for that reason, I failed to give you a happy ending to the story. All of the hard-earned results from those days spent staring at the wall turned into Chicken Tikka Masala-inspired poundage, with just one video of a single win, in a single tournament that no one remembers anymore to show for it. Please, for your sake and mine, take a second to consider the gravity of what has been lost so far, and what we can avoid losing by practicing that consistency moving forward.
I’m working on a new story now, and it’s a lot more boring. There’s no tournament, and there’s no asshole telling me I can’t do it. Instead, I just wake up super early, meditate, and head to my living room for a bodyweight workout. After that, I usually do some shadowboxing—Taekwondo got lame really fast (that, and I met a frightfully muscular retired boxer from Chicago, but that’s a story for another time). And then… I get in the kitchen and cook. That’s about it. Just taking care of my wellness—every aspect, mindfulness included—and training along the way. It’s a lot less sexy, but it’s far more effective than anything I’ve done before. Keeping your nose to the ground and silently doing what you’re supposed to won’t make for nearly as cool of a story, but doing all of it without any instant gratification is just another method of breaking those limits. If you want to be the guy from the martial arts movie, the top of your field, or even just stay sane and be happy, then I recommend you do the same thing.
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