When your back's up against a wall, fight like hell

My life is still completely unrecognizable from one week to the next, but things are finally stabilizing. For the first time since I moved to San Francisco, I've had a chance to take a look around and see where this crazy four-and-a-half-month ride has taken me. I've finally been laid off for the season at the bike shop, so I have my weekends back. I'm training people anywhere from 12 to 17 hours per week and writing more than I ever wrote when I was unemployed and the freelance gig was my only job. I live outside the city. I am now considered "full time" at work, and spend 12+ hours at or near the studio a day. I'm responsible for the company newsletter. I'm sober without AA and don't even remember to count how long it's been anymore (about 4 months). This week, for the first time since September, I was able to afford a full grocery trip. I had to remind myself not to feel guilty for buying shampoo.

But these past two weeks have been the scariest yet. In one week I reached the tipping point where I could not grow my business anymore without a key to the studio. Also, I would be paying more by giving them 40% of my income than if I just went on "full rent." To get the key, I would have to stop the 40% payment plan and come up with $1300 in a week. On top of that, a $400 debt that I had deemed "unessential" for four months finally asserted itself as "important" by having a collection agency call me and tell me I had 2 weeks to pay it. That day my phone got thrown clear across the room, nearly hitting one of the owners who was perched on a bench. "Here, you dropped this," Ducky (not his real name) said in that tone of voice that men have for avoiding women's temper tantrums.

I took it and flung it into the bathroom. Someone came out of the bathroom a few minutes later and handed me my phone. "Someone left this on the floor in the bathroom," he told me. I threw it in the corner behind some filing cabinets and didn't dig it out until I had made good and sure that it would stay there without ringing and without being returned to me for at least half an hour. To top it all off, because of a clerical error my pet deposit ($290) from Shane's place was returned to the wrong place: to Shane. And he cashed it. In the thick of bill collectors calling me, now I had to call the property management company and use the same threatening language that I had learned from the grouchy bill collectors. I hated this. I missed the days of steady paychecks and benefits packages.

Miserable, I approached Ducky and Evil Kenevil (the owners) looking for a stay of execution on the $1700 I was going to have to pull out of my ass in 2 weeks, most of which was going to them.

"You've got to stay positive," was Ducky's advice. I was kind of hoping for advice that offered the words, "a free month's rent."

"How can I stay positive when I haven't been able to afford groceries for three months and now I'm supposed to come up with 150% of my average monthly income for that period in just 2 weeks???" I asked.

"When you've got your back up against the wall," Evil Kenevil said, "Fight like hell. If you didn't have a fire under your ass like this, you'd get complacent."

The advice was anything but what I'd been hoping to hear, but Ducky and Evil Kenevil had slept in the gym for two years to get it off the ground. Now they had a bank account a million dollars strong. I was here to learn from these guys, and although I sometimes bristled at their pushy big-business talk, I knew that I would never survive in this big, mean world without them.

Despite the long days and the stress, I've been feeling really lucky to have my job lately. I'm no longer "the new kid," and I've had the chance to see other trainers try to break their way in:

"He come in talking about how he was a 'Big Picture Guy,' and then the only business experience he had to tell me about was a gym that folded in the first 2 years!" Ducky said of one perspective trainer that he'd turned down.

"He's just 28 or some shit like that. He's just a young kid. He thinks he knows everything, but he don't know shit!" he said about another. Hey, I'm only 27!

"He comes in looking like a model and says he's some big-shot bodybuilder and I looked him up and he didn't even win that shit!" he said about another. "If you gon' brag about something, you better have fucking won it!" I was beginning to think that maybe Ducky wasn't as unobservant as I'd originally thought. He probably had noticed that I'd never held the title of "trainer" before, (even though I'd worked in gyms for years and been certified twice).

"Ducky, why did you hire me when you didn't hire all those other people with stronger resumes than mine?" I asked.

"For two reasons," he said. "Because you could write and because you came from Boston. None of these lazy motherfuckers that work here would ever pick up and move 'cross the country with nothing and try to build they own business! That takes balls. You're willing to do the things that most people's scared to do. If you come from Boston and you ain't got shit, then we will help you get started because we already know that you're willing to do whatever it takes to get what you want, but if you come from San Francisco and you ain't got shit, you's either stupid or lazy.

"All these people think it's like magic that I built this bu'ness up from the ground in the middle of a recession and now I got motherfuckers comin' in off the street who want to pay $80/hour to train with us. They don't see everything that it took to get there." He started walking, putting one heel carefully in front of the toes of the other foot. "I just started walking while all those other fools were sitting there in their comfortable 24 Hour Fitness jobs, and to those guys who wasn't looking they say, 'How'd you get from here to there? That must be magic!' But they don't see that anything look like magic to those fools who never take a step." Jim Collins calls that the Flywheel Concept, by the way.

A day or two later I asked Ducky if he would train me for a session just to see what his style was like. "I'm about to do a workout right now. Why don't you work in with me?" he asked.

We warmed up and then he asked me how I'd been training lately. "I haven't been doing much of anything to tell you the truth, Ducky," I said. "I haven't been training because I don't want to make myself hungry. When you can't buy food, getting hungry is bad."

"How can you train other people when you ain't training yourself?" he said in disgust and disbelief.

"I don't know... I mean I've been riding, but..."

"You'll see. You get back into training and you'll be on fire for your clients. Your clients will become like your fan club. They love that shit and then the referrals will start rolling in.When you ain't training, the quality of your workouts just sucks. You don't push people because you think everything's hard."

He was right. The workouts I'd been giving had sucked since I started going hungry because I was focused on where my next meal was coming from, not that I loved my job. I made it a point to take an hour out of every day and just train again, just to get back in shape. Can't afford it? Oh well, I'd just Act As If I could afford it. I'd deal with the what I was training for just as soon as training was a habit again. And wouldn't you know, my clients started opening up to me after that. New people started appearing through different avenues.

But now that I'm back to working out, I can't believe how far I've fallen. I'm someone who's staked my whole self-worth for the past seven years on being extremely physically active. Fitness has been my job ever since my publishing job went under in May of 2009. It's humbling to get sore. It's even more humbling to not be able to do things.

The other day I dusted off my sexy bike and went to change the flat tire that I'd noticed when I hung it up almost 2 months ago. But all my spare tubes had valves that were too short for my rims, and I ruined two tubes trying to will the damned things to work. One tube wound up in a tree, and the Tarmac stayed in the garage. I took my new Allez out instead figuring that a bike's a bike if you're not racing, right?

A little bit about where I live: Pacifica is one of those coastal towns that has the beach, a coastal highway, and then mountains all within half a mile of shore. The mountains aren't tall, but they're sure as hell steep. I live near the bottom of a canyon on the back side of one of those hills. To get anywhere, I have to go over the hill.

I set out to find my way 10 miles along the ridges to San Francisco. I came out the driveway, rode a block, and started climbing... at a 20% grade. There is a half-mile climb out of the canyon, but it's an average of about a 15% grade with 2/3 of it being around 20%. My little Allez has two fewer climbing gears than my Tarmac (the smallest gear is a 25, not a 27). And I haven't been seriously training since May. I was a wreck.

I got to the top of that hill without getting off my bike, but people standing in their driveways were turning their heads to watch me pass because they could hear me huffing and puffing from three driveways away. When I got to the top of the hill I thought I was going to throw up. Then I made a left and got half way down the hill when I realized that I was headed back into the canyon. I should have gone right. Damn. Now I had to go back up there! I returned to the top of the hill pretty sure that I was going to die and still less than a mile from the house. Then I rode down to the coast.

By the time I got to sea level, I still hadn't recovered and my insides felt like they were going to rot out of my body. I had hiccups from breathing so hard, and they were so violent that I thought I would rupture something. I. Was. Miserable. I sat on a low wall for about 10 minutes until the Yuck in my body subsided, then I decided that I'd had quite enough and it was time to go home. One problem though: I had to go BACK over the hill. My lungs were sore and I was coughing for the rest of the day.

I was so angry with myself. How could I let myself get to this point? How could I be SO out of shape? Who was I anymore? Moreover, who was I trying to kid? I'd gone less than 9 miles. This was war!

The next day I got out my racing bike and got my new housemate's help in fixing it up. It involved adjusting the cables, bending the derailleur hanger, replacing the chain, and giving the whole thing a healthy dose of lube. Then I went for a ride. I took a less steep way out of the canyon and managed to find my way out to San Francisco all by myself. I took route 35, called "Skyline Blvd," which seemed like a pretty great choice for a challenging ride through the hills and along the coast. What they don't tell you is that Skyline becomes a fucking FREEWAY for a couple of miles. I mean FREEWAY with exits, shit on the shoulder, a 55 mph speed limit, on-ramps and all.

I was riding along, feeling quite pleased with myself and looking forward to the windy descent back into Pacifica over the road that I'd just climbed. I'd just crested the hill and was now in South San Francisco (which is not actually part of San Francisco). I could recognize the big radio tower and a few of the hills of SF up ahead of me. There were trees on my left and right and pine cones on the ground. Suddenly I saw a sign that said "Begin Freeway!" I looked around. There were three lanes of traffic between me and the divider and three more lanes of traffic before the shoulder on the other side. I would have to ride at least half a mile in the wrong direction to get back to the last intersection. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!!!!!!!!!! I thought. There was a tiny little sign with a bicycle on it that said "Share the Road," and I thought foolishly, Maybe that FREEWAY sign was a mistake!

Then I saw the 55 mph speed limit. Then I saw an exit sign. Then I heard cars behind me that might very well want to get OFF at that exit going 55 miles per hour just as I was crossing it. Then I saw the ON ramp with people coming off the interstate. I was going to have to cross that too, and people coming off the interstate onto another freeway certainly aren't looking for bicycles. I saw a break in the traffic and tried to cut right across the ramp back to the shoulder. A car kept coming. I kept making my intention clear. The car kept coming. Finally I came to a dead stop (on my bicycle, on the freeway) and let him go by. He had moved slightly RIGHT onto the shoulder, which meant that if I hadn't stopped, he would have most certainly hit me. Fuck that!

I found a way back home that was flatter and on frontage roads.

Last week I worked out six out of seven days, and when I walked into the gym in the afternoon Ducky told me that I was looking buff. "Yep, that's all it takes, two sessions," I told him.

So what are YOUR suggestions on what my next goal should be? Weigh in on the poll on the sidebar.