Not all that different

Through each phase of your life, you retain parts of it that ultimately make you unique. I, for one, have many a mental/emotional/physical scar, buzzed hair, stretched earlobes, and tattoos. Today, I will talk about smaller things that tie together.

Since I have been training for the police department tests, I attempted to buy a pair of shoes that are supposed to be more suited for running. In short they did not work for me. Why is that? I have never before wore a pair of shoes to do a specific thing. Since my skateboarding days I have worn Vans or something very similar to Vans, you know, something with very little padding and what I feel to be a great tread. Every pair is designed to be eaten by my skateboard so it does not matter how they look or how much mud and crap I step through. These are dude shoes. In the end, I went back to my regular shoes for running as they just do not do it for me. My regular shoes just feel natural. Is it bad? No, it is what I know.

Which brings me to another topic that may sound dumb. How have I found my talent in weightlifting? My skateboard. I have never been a great skater, but I have been a functional skater. If it helped me loco-mote I learned it. With that in mind, after studying pictures of other skaters pulling tricks and watching videos of pros pulling tricks, I obviously learned what these tricks are. Now as you think about it, these tricks tend to work your muscles at different angles in different ways. I eventually started to see these as different exercises. An ollie works you differently than just rolling off a curb. If I just ride around for hours on end, that is less exercise than adding in Porn Stars, End-Overs, Monster Walks, Ollies, along with attempts at Hospital Flips, Kickflips, Dropping in, and so forth. As skateboarding phased out and weightlifting phased in I slowly started to kind of apply the principal in the same way. My body is now the board and each exercise is a trick I can do. Like this week with only doing bodyweight stuff, I go from neutral grip pull-ups to chinups to attempts at burpees and then on to dips and a good ton of pushups. I don't know if this makes sense to anyone but myself but here's why I have gotten so good at putting on size.

And today I was doing pushups on the Smith Machine going up a notch until about level with my chest and back down and I really went slow and took notice of my muscles in action. It was very cool.

It really is still so hard to imagine this hard edged straight edger has become such a man of size and reason. Maybe one day I will have all the pieces of myself stitched together right.