Getting fitter, being in shape, dieting, exercise; it’s a
very popular topic, and the basis of an enormous industry. With all the talk about fitness and the
plethora of gyms popping up on every corner, you’d think that a question as simple
as “What does is mean to be fit?” would be as easy to answer as “What’s 2 plus
2?” Initially we may even think we have
an answer, but dig a little deeper and things start to get complicated.
Some years ago I found myself in a
parking lot standing outside my car with my keys, wallet, and phone locked
safely inside. Seeing as it was summer,
I took off my shirt and flipflops and ran the 7 miles home, climbed up to and
through my second story bedroom window, grabbed my spare key, and ran the 7
miles back to my waiting car. Great
story, no?
As inconsequential as this experience
may seem at first glance, it actually serves as a perfect illustration of the
concept “Fitness,’ which, for the sake of argument, I’ll define as nothing more
than being capable. With that said, understand that Fitness is
not the 14 miles I ran or the second story window I climbed through. By this I mean that Fitness is not something
defined by some measurement; it is not quantifiable. To understand why, it’s necessary to mention
life and one of its defining characteristics; randomness.
To put it simply, life, as part of
nature, is full of random events and processes.
As such, it is unpredictable. And
it is precisely this unpredictability that doesn’t allow Fitness to be quantifiable. Think about it this way; unlike that 5K
you’re running next month, I did not know a month ahead that I would lock
myself out of my car. This means that I
didn’t spend that month training to run 14 miles and working on my ability to
climb through my bedroom window.
This takes us back to the idea of
Fitness as capability. If this sounds
vague, that’s because it is. Specificity
does us no good in anything but the most controlled, man-made
environments. In order to be capable in
the face of randomness, we need to be generally
capable. Can you run home to grab your
spare keys? Can you swim to shore when the boat you’re on sinks? Can you climb that tree to get your son’s
kite? Sure these may sound far fetched,
but there’s no way to know what life will bring.
Where does that leave us? For better or for worse, viewing fitness in this light doesn’t provide any easy answers. What it gives us instead is a way of viewing Fitness as a continuous process that is never quite finished. If this sounds daunting, I invite you to read my previous post “Means without Ends.”
As for myself, I can’t tell you how much I bench, how fast I can run a mile, or how high I can jump. I don’t know, and I don’t care to know. What I do know is that I love the randomness of life too much to not be fit for it. To do so is to view everything as an opportunity for improvement; faster, stronger, smarter, fitter.
