Reduct: How do you define success?

As discussed in my prior post from three years ago: I was once asked a question during a job interview: How do you define success? At that moment, I recalled my marathon experiences, so I answered the question by describing when I felt successful. I prepared for my marathon races with a training schedule and a meal plan, and I followed both as though they were prescribed by God. As my training progressed, I recorded the desired results, which showed a decreasing heart rate sustaining greater and greater distances traveled in consistently increasing speeds. I was even given a shiny souvenir of my success through each finisher's medal received.

Though I answered the question truthfully, I knew it wasn't exactly right. Six years later, I think I have a better answer. I now define success through the response of two questions: are you well? and are you happy? If one can truthfully affirm the first question, then the second question can be affirmed with ease, and being able to say yes to both questions thereby indicates success. The trick is to define wellness, which I believe is composed of three elements: spirit, health, and fitness.

The element of spirit covers topics such as faith, mentality, mindfulness, self-awareness, and relationships. A myriad of metrics can be applied to the element of fitness, such as weight, blood pressure, body mass index, resting heart rate, and VO2 max. The area where the elements of spirit and fitness overlap reveal the element of health. Since the beginning of this blog, I learned about each element of wellness independently, and over time, I realized this paradigm to express wellness matters within one's control. Exogenous events, such as the death of a loved one, a cancer diagnosis, or a car accident, can severely impact one's wellness, but navigating through those situations with wellness in mind still requires accessing these three elements. In this way, success is related to your wellness given your circumstances, or "centris paribus" as an economist would say.

Within this paradigm, I would access that my time spent on running marathons provided success in the area of fitness while also providing some exposure to matters of the spirit, but I was not actually well. My faith was not yet formed, and I suffered from migraines on a monthly basis. I had relationships that were difficult and damaging, and I did not feel as though I was progressing in my goals. I now believe I used marathon running as a way to escape from problems that were difficult to define and without any real solutions that were acceptable to me. So I desperately tried to achieve success and happiness through marathon running.

Six years ago, I answered the interview question without fully understanding the depth of my self-deception. For many years, I tried to recall the person that I was when I ran marathons as a means to regain a sense of success. I would commit and recommit to a training schedule and track the pace of my running courses, but it was never sustainable. At some point during my training, I would forgo a run and opt to watch TV on my couch dressed in my pajamas with a pound of Trader Joe's chocolate bar at my disposal. As the weight accumulated, the self-deception would ebb and flow. I would find myself at some unacceptable dress size and give the training schedule another try. I would progress nicely for a short while, but something eventually would divert my attention and the cycle repeats.

No longer near the form required to train for a marathon, but with the three elements of wellness freshly emerged in my mind, I recently began building my cardio base. I started with interval training through Spin classes, and I challenged my patience and endurance by regularly running a 6-mile course. As my heart rate began to stabilize at different exertion levels, I started to lift weights and became mindful of what I was eating. I decided that fitness may preclude the chocolate bar from my diet, but wellness mandates three squares of chocolate whenever it was urgently needed, but only after eating my veggies.

I now exercise a minimum of 45 minutes a day, 5 or 6 days weeks. I normally far exceed this goal because exercise itself also lifts my spirit. I've lost close to 20 pounds within three months, gained a few worthwhile relationships, and I am within striking distance to consider training for a full marathon. Maybe it is fair to say that I have already started training for a marathon, but I'm not yet sure when I will be at the starting line. Under the present circumstances, or centris paribus if preferred, I am at peace, which may be the best place to breed success. So I retract my final statements in my prior post - no new identity required, and Overpronator will resume.

Regeneration

I heard somewhere from some unidentified source that you are an entirely new person once every seven years. The idea is that every single cell in your body is different, or rather, new, every seven years. For me, and I imagine as with most Americans, this concept carried very little significance until the third and fourth cycle of regeneration. This thought is based on adulthood legally beginning at 18 years of age, and prototypical American culture allowing young adults to extend their parental dependence through their early 20s via undergraduate studies.

In retrospect, I believe that my life was relatively stable by 21, though the term stable may not be accurate. At the time, I remember feeling like a leaf blowing in the wind. Though it was not a particularly comfortable place, I now realize that I was actually a young leaf, one that was green and hydrated. As for the blowing in the wind, it was really more like a floating in the wind, but I was extremely eager to be firmly planted somewhere … fast.

During that third cycle, and the beginnings of the fourth, everything seemed to be progressing in the direction of being planted. Then the tail end of the fourth cycle brought a terrible, terrible wind. By 28, everything I had hoped and planned was redefined, and I found myself engaged in a painful renewal process under conditions of sheer duress and an absolute lack of alternatives.

I was stripped of everything that was old and familiar, and I landed somewhere else entirely. At the very beginning of the fifth cycle, I was a weathered crumbling leaf being ripped and flung about by a cold dry wind. I suppose this might be considered the final phases of maturation, or perhaps it was more of a focused study on the solitary aspects of true independence. No matter the nomenclature, it was not and is still not a pleasant process.

Currently, I am in the middle of the fifth cycle, and everything around me is in fact entirely new. I look at photos of people that I consider as part of my support network (part friends, part colleagues), and their entry into my life are all relatively recent. The people prior to my fourth cycle have virtually disappeared, save a lingering few whose lives I witness via social media and nothing more.

I am … or have become even more so … a solitary figure. I have always tended to be a solitary person mostly by circumstance, and only sometimes by choice. It just seems strange that my cellular regenerations have made me more and more alone. Or have I simply purged myself of people that were detrimental to my internal growth, and I had previously surrounded myself with confining characters?

I am not quite sure about any of these musing, but I feel an odd sense of external happiness. To put it simply, I like the way things are in my life. Each day does offer some kind of purpose, but internally, I feel a type of depressed anxiety. I don’t feel particularly lonely in my quasi-solitude. I am involved in a committed relationship that has varying levels of co-dependence that is more dictated by a given situation rather than psychological need. If anything, it would seem that I am progressing on a truer course than I was during the third cycle. However, the internal warmth and feeling of safety is absent in the midst of this fifth cycle.

Does this mean that I am now truly jaded? Or perhaps I am being overly cautious and not allowing myself to internally recline in a more relaxed state of confidence? I don’t have anything that would even begin to lead me to something that looks like a partial answer to these questions. I just hope that by the end of the fifth cycle, and just prior to me staring down the sixth, this maniacal wind will finally cease, and I will have finally planted roots somewhere. I pray that somewhere is close, incredibly close, virtually exactly where I am now. I don’t think I can handle another wind with any measurable degree of ferocity.

Tempo Run #2 and the Last Tuesday

It was tough, but I got through it.



Part of the impetus was having to rush home for the last Tuesday night. I have been a loyal Gilmore Girls fan since it's debut episode seven years ago. I watched Rory stumble through her class schedule on her first day at Chilton, I cried during her well crafted and equally well executed valediction, which was rich in literary allegory, and I fell head over heals in love with Triston (and yet I feel NOTHING for Lucas Scott), Max Medina and the more recent Logan Huntsberger (personally, I would have said yes).

I managed to hook my Beau on to the show through Take Out Tuesday I instituted many moons ago. I decided that the only proper way to watch the Gilmore Girls is to eat like the Gilmore Girls. So over the years, there have been numerous pizzas with fancy beer in tow, fake Chinese food loaded with MSG, Thai food that is probably a little less unhealthy and wee bit more authentic than the Chinese stuff, Boston Market, more pizzas, and there was even a Sundae Tuesday.

On one special Tuesday, after being so tenderly nursed by my Beau for several days, I dragged my fevered-sweaty-flu-stricken person to the market and crafted Sugar Night. It was adorned with M&Ms, brownies, Twizzlers, Twix, cookies, and a myriad of other items that was washed down by a steamy mug of Ovaltine hot chocolate (I was sick after all). Somewhere along the way between Sugar Night and the first Tuesday Night Pizza, my Beau became a Gilmore Girls fan. He came up with a song to express not only his fanship, but also his love for Tuesdays with the Girls. The song is merely the word Tuesday sung to the melody of Deutschland Uber Alles (direct translation is Germany Over All, which means Germany above all other countries), more commonly known as Hitler's anthem.

Yes, Tuesdays and the Gilmore Girls have been something really special in our lives together. Unfortunately, with my training efforts over the last year, take out Tuesday has fallen by the wayside, and the new episodes were taped to be viewed on a day other than Tuesday. The spirit of Tuesday had perished, and the Tuesday Anthem had not been sung for many moons. But with the series finale last night, I ran through the Tempo Run in an effort to revive Tuesday one last time.

We ordered the Somerset pizza from Panico's, and had picked up Twizzlers as a straw for our Boylan sodas, brownies, a lot of ice cream and organic Oreos at the market over the weekend for the occasion. We munched away on our Tuesday Take Out as the Gilmores engaged in Friday Night dinner. I gobbled down a big huge bowl of ice cream (so much for thinking that I'm lactose intolerant ... I'm so not) at Rory's Bon Voyage party as an online magazine reporter tasked to travel with Barack Obama's campaign trail. It was a bittersweet Tuesday night, and yours truly suffered from a severe belly ache immediately afterwards.