Exercise is another name for a love-hate relationship. If you’re like me, you can love when it ends, and hate when it starts. I greatly prefer leaving the exercise room than approaching it. I find it’s really not a matter of loving the results and hating the process. For me, it’s a matter of time. I dislike setting aside the hour, three mornings a week, for moving while staying in place. It seems nothing is being accomplished. The process is a waste of time.
On the other hand, I do tell myself: I know there’s a long-term benefit. My leg muscles are surely being strengthened by the push-and-pull efforts on the machines I endure. Who knows, as the result of my exercising, the knee pain may vanish in the not-too-distant future. I tell myself things will be different; events will return to normal.
After all, my left knee doesn’t hurt when I stand or sit, but only when I walk – when the joint must be moved, ever so slightly. I also acknowledge the pain, itself, is not all-that-bad, perhaps a mere “two” or “three” on that mythical rating scale which goes to ten, a value reserved for ultimate torture by the Taliban. So why do it?
Why, a month-and-a-half ago, did I restart this discipline?
Discipline. That, too, is what exercise requires. A daily habit. A method for improvement which comes only from constant repetition. Like learning how to play a piano. Or how to live a righteous life. That’s really what being a disciple means: to live out the same life as the Master one follows. I know this theologically. Christ said to Andrew and James, as well as to his other friends, “Come, follow me. See where I live. Do what I do, if you are to be one of my disciples.” Yes, a discipleship is more than mere learning. It’s experiencing. It is doing. It is “changing” as a result of the experience and the action being undertaken. The Greeks called it metanoia – a change of mind, a change of heart. I call it exercise.
I’m not alone in that viewpoint. Ignatius of Loyola, after his own experience of encountering the Divine, designed his “spiritual exercises” to help his companions change and to become someone for the “greater glory of God.” I think I prefer his exercises to the ones I do in the first-floor exercise room at Eagle’s Trace.
Actually, I do his spiritual exercises more frequently than I do my physical ones. For almost forty years I’ve been following the Ignatian experience of prayerful meditation offered through my daily practice of reading the Liturgical Hours. Thus far, I’ve put in, endured, a mere total of forty hours for my physical knee bending in comparison with some four decades for spiritual genuflection.
I’ve done this physical knee bending before. This is not the first time I’ve engaged in the love-hate relationship of a workout in a gym. In my mid-forties, that time of mid-life crisis examined by Dante in his Divine Comedy, I stopped off at the local Nautilus on my way home from work, three evenings a week. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday (or almost every one of them) I spent an hour on a dozen torture racks designed by the Nautilus equipment company. They still manufacture workout equipment but the current locations for the communal use of their product appears to be dominated by LA Fitness. Back then it was Nautilus.
However, I admit my preference was not for the machines designed for leg-arm-chest-back improvement, but rather, the availability, afterwards, of the dry sauna and the bubbling hot tub. I could enjoy using them seven days a week, instead of merely three – the number of actual days I chose, in the belief that a “recovery” day was necessary between the ones required for the destruction of my muscles.
My physiology textbooks had once informed me that the building of new muscle fibers occurred during these rest-times between their breakdowns. I have firmly believed this observation and have refused to pursue a seven-day workout to rebuild my knees, even though there are some friends who maintain I should exercise seven days a week.
If exercise were not a love-hate relationship, I might be more open to a reconsideration of the recovery time needed for the reconstruction of the protein fibers in the muscles I use for voluntary movement. Fortunately, cardiac muscle fibers are different from those found in either voluntary or involuntary muscles; they don’t need a downtime. It is toward the build-up of the voluntary muscles in my legs that I volunteer the time needed for them to be improved.
I have no intention to be like one of my grandsons (Thomas) who is a bodybuilder and has, with training, curvature and definition to spare. I’m willing to devote only a limited time, some three hours a week, toward this activity.
To minimize the amount of time I might “waste” during this process, I have taken to reading from my Kindle while pedaling a cross-trainer. My current book is one written by N. T. Wright, an Episcopalian bishop and theologian, entitled: God and the Pandemic: A Christian Reflection on the Coronavirus and its Aftermath.
It seems it is, after all, possible to engage in physical and spiritual exercise at the same moment. Perhaps the basic question remains on many levels: when can I truly expect that a positive change will occur, that events will return to normal, that my pain (physical, spiritual and emotional) will pass away, that life will be as it was before? Or does life exist, as does exercise, in a love-hate relationship? A relationship which must be endured until metanoia has finally been accomplished.