I am sitting here, enjoying one of the best days of my life.
Waiting for dinner to heat. Trying to work.
And I come across this piece I don’t remember writing.
A cover story for those New Year’s Resolution types.
Day just got better. From December 31, 1990. – JDW
I sometimes study behavior that appears to defy logic – that’s usually my own behavior. But when you dig deeper – when you dig as deep as I do – you discover that there is somebody on the inside who had a particular outcome in mind; when you hear that logic, it makes sense.
“People would stop beating themselves up, if they knew that their internal survival mechanisms were at work CONSTANTLY protecting them. If they would look at behavior as a creative MESSAGE, they’d begin to understand.”- Alyce Cornyn-Selby
PUSHING MUSCLES TO THE MAX
She gets up at 4:30 a.m. in the morning and does forty-five minutes to an hour of abdominal exercises before sunrise.
If you learn nothing more about Dianne Martindale, you already know that this is one extraordinarily disciplined human being.
She’s also a woman and a weight lifter.
Forty-four years old, Martindale could still get carded. Long blond, shimmery hair, a glow in her cheeks, a sparkle in her eyes.
WOW!
Looking at her, you find yourself thinking she might be on to something here. “I do weight training six days a week. I lift heavy weights, starting right after work, and I’m in the gym until 9:30 or 10 every night,” Dianne says.
On the seventh day, she doesn’t even rest. “I usually do some type of aerobic exercise on Sundays.”
Martindale takes no steroids, no drugs. She has never smoked, though she’ll have the occasional glass of wine. “I don’t eat meat, salt, sugar, sweets. I eat really good stuff. Vegetables, fruits, grains” – the thought of food animates her. “My husband con’t believe how much food I eat. To me, he eats like a little bird. I eat all day. I bring a grocery bag full of snacks to work every morning.”
Always slender, she’s five-feet-four, “and 5/8ths!”, she laughs. And 122 pounds. “I’ve probably put on twenty pounds, although I am about the same size.” Which is a 4, maybe 6, it depends on the garment.
Martindale was thirty-two when she first walked into a weight room. Looking for Muscle Tone.
Not so very many weeks later. “I looked at the results (of her work) and I developed a real need for it. I became a fanatic about lifting,” she confesses. “I don’t know if it’s a sickness or not.”
More of us should be this ill.
“I know that I overdo it,” Martindale says without apparent regret. She speaks in a soft, almost whispery, voice.
I’ve made a lot of sacrifices,” Diane acknowledges. “I don’t see a lot of my friends. I don’t get to do the social things that other people get to do. I can’t stand to sit, to go to the movies. I like to move around.” She stops and starts talking again. She seems to want to share her feelings. Small-boned, almost fragile, yet strong. So very strong. “I don’t know how someone gets so involved. I don’t get a chance to go shopping, to visit downtown, to read.”
Her husband, then her fiancee, bought Dianne some books for Christmas, the one before the one we just survived. Books he was certain she’d enjoy. She has yet to crack even one.
“Actually, he does complain a little bit that I’m at the gym all the time,” Mrs. Martindale confirms, noting she skipped a few workouts while on her honeymoon. “But, he understands, I would like to be home more.
“I need to have it. It really is in my blood,” says the woman who is always in peak competitive condition, yet never competes. “I’m into it so much, it would bother me to miss a day. It’s a real priority for me. My workout comes first. It’s number one.”
Lifting weights, several tons a week (“I don’t even notice how much it is. I just keep piling them on as I get stronger.”), Diane Martindale is happy. “Right now, I feel better than I’ve ever felt in my life. I like feeling that I’m really on top of everything.
“That’s what the consistency means. Accomplishment.”
HAVE YOU HUGGED YOUR BIKE TODAY?
If Mark Greenblatt had a bumper sticker, he’d probably have that one. If he had a car.
Mark Greenblatt is a biker. A serious cyclist.
“This is during the summer,” he cautions. “I’m up at 5:30 to go swim two miles at J.C.C. (Jewish Community Center). Then I commute to work – by bike – four miles. Work all day. Bike the four miles back home. Go for a 35-40 mile ride. Then maybe another half mile swim. On weekends, I try to ride up to one hundred miles. With a good deal of climbing.”
I got tired just hearing about it.
In the winter, like now, with darkness falling before you get off the job, he’s swimming more and lifting weights, too. Crashed three times on the ice last year. No training wheels. He used to run marathons, but a toe injury makes that exercise somewhat intolerable.
“It’s never been something I’ve not been doing,” the curly-haired Greenblatt says.
Me, I’ve seen this same look in all their eyes, these body builders. these fitness fanatics, these…
“I’ve always been training, so I can’t say there’s been a time when it’s made a drastic change in my life. It’s what I do. It’s who I am.”
He says he doesn’t know really that he’s made many sacrifices. Wistfully. “Maybe in past relationships.” Sigh. Then he brightens.
“My training has taken priority. I’ve never made a lot of money, but it’s allowed me the spare time to do what I wanted to do.”
Which is to ride his bike a lot. “I love to train. I’ve always loved to train. I’m very goal-oriented. Biking (no pun intended) gives me a vehicle (well, maybe just a little one) to set some goals and then to attain them.”
Greenblatt is rolling. “I’m very good physically at setting a goal and then achieving it. You get into a rhythm, a sense of using more of your potential. We all have more than we tap. I feel – at least in my training – that I can get closer to my limits.”
The wheels are turning. “It’s just a nice feeling to be pushing yourself to the max.”
Mark Greenblatt is not content to coast through his life. “I know I’m different,” he says plainly. “But, I know something else. It’s a nice feeling to be so fit, to know you’re at your best. It changes your outlook on life.”
TRIPLE THREAT
Five a.m. At an hour best suited for sleeping, Buck Lortz is already thinking about the triathlon, a grueling ordeal requiring the aquatic skills of Mark Spitz, the cycling savvy of Greg LeMond, and the legs of Steve Prefontaine.
It’s interesting. A sport which involves swimming a great distance, biking a great distance, then running a great distance. One right after the other. As fast as you can go. Usually in the heat. This is a sport?
So, Lortz is headed for the pool at 5 a.m. He’s headed for the pool to swim some of the ten-thousand to twelve-thousand yards he’ll cover in a single week. 10,000-12,000.
“Five years ago, I had a deathly fear of the water,” the forty-year-old father of two young girls admits. “I didn’t even know how to swim.”
Lunch time. Lortz, a computer draftsman at LTK Engineering, heads out the door for his noontime workout. In an average week, he’ll run forty (40) miles.
Six p.m. Night time is the bike time. “I try to get in 180 to 200 miles weekly,” Lortz offers, in a tone that suggests he’s doing nothing unusual. Many of us don’t drive our cars that far.
The five-eleven, one-fifty-five Lortz doesn’t seem out of the ordinary. he doesn’t look any different than anybody else. Calmer maybe. Although the clear blue eyes could be those of an eagle.
It’s the walls of his office that provide some clues. One sign: IF YOU DON’T MAKE DUST, YOU EAT DUST. Words to live by. There’s a slogan: “Just Say NO! to Drugs.” A poster from the New York City Marathon is tacked above one poster of cyclists next to another from a triathlon championship. Across the way is a large, personally autographed photo of LeMond at the Tour de France.
There are a half-dozen plaques, a handful of ribbons, and one little trophy. It seems like small reward for all that work. Then again, Lortz doesn’t exercise merely to in competitive trinkets.
“As far back as I can remember, I’ve been involved in athletics. It’s part of my life,” Lortz explains. “I don’t what I’d do without sports.”
He earned twelve (12) varsity letters at pacific University, where he began his career as a 235-fullback. Football, soccer, tennis – he was a triathlete then in an unique sense.
“I think the people I associate with,” is Lortz’s answer, when asked about the return in his investment. “You’re always meeting new people. And, frankly, the people involved in the triathlon seem more genuine to me.”
You can meet nice people a lot of places without working up much of a sweat.
“And then there’s the feeling I get while I’m doing it,” he actually smiles, “and afterwards. There’s no better feeling. Life really brightens up… There’s the satisfaction of accomplishment, kind of a high. I just don’t how to explain.” His face says it all for him.
Is it worth like the sacrifice? He has to think about that. “Hmmm. I don’t look at it that way, as a sacrifice,” says Lortz. “Some family time, I guess. I don’t let it interfere with my work, which I tended to do when I was younger.
“People are always asking me, how I find the time,” Lortz anticipates a question headed his way again. “I guess I believe these people don’t realize just home much trime is available to them if they really wanted to do it. I mean, I’m in the pool at five a.m.”
Buck doesn’t stop here. “Don’t be afraid to do it,” advises Lortz. “There’s guys out there (in the triathlon) who have amputated legs, who are blind, or way overweight. I think the media really overplays the difficulty of the sport. Anyone can become a triathlete, if they put their mind to it.
“Find a reason to do it, rather than make an excuse not to do it.” He seems awfully sincere. “It’s pretty wasy at five o’clock in the morning to find a reason not to to go swim and stay in bed. I’ll tell you. Pretty easy.”
OFF AND RUNNING
Since 1966, Del Scharffenberg has ridden his bike 108,780 miles. But he doesn’t think of himself as a cyclist. Del Scharffenberg is a runner. Through November 30, he’d logged – on foot, mind you – 37,889 miles.
The forty-five-year-old computer programmer is also a numbers nut. He’s run over 830 races in sixteen years. He’s run 86 marathons and 73 ultras, races longer than the standard 26 miles, 385 yards. “I’m just a race-aholic.”
His body fat is around eight, eight & a half percent. It’s safe to say the man is dense. In 1985, he covered 384 miles in a six-day event. He recently ran 118 miles in twenty-four hours. For those of you sitting at home in your big cushy stationary chair, that’s 472 laps around the local high-school track.
Running. Twenty-four hours. In a row. Consecutively.
“People ask me why I run. I like it. It’s that simple,” Del is bemused. “You don’t ask a golfer why he golfs. You don’t ask somebody who watches television for hours why they do it.”
An asthmatic most of his life, he runs ugly. No other way to put it. He runs with a limp, a reminder of a motorcycle accident some quarter century ago. He looks, as someone once told him, like “an animal caught in a bear trap.”
[Back in the day, I was faster than most. Slow runners feared me. But I can tell you – straight fact – chasing that limping, curly-haired sonuvagun could be a little demoralizing. – ed. note]
“Spectators have actually begged me to quit,” he shakes his head. “I look so bad, they figure I must be in great pain. I’m really appalled when I see myself on video. I’m appalled,” he repeats. “I hate it.”
Scarffenberg is quick to point out there are no extra points awarded for style. Not in running anyway. The prize is not even limited to the first person to get from point A to point B.
The prize also goes to the runner who pushes himself to his highest level. “With only a few exceptions, every one of these races, I’m going out and giving it my best shot.”
And, after all, that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Giving it your best shot. It’s something anybody can do, they tell us. These incredible athletes, so committed, are really just everyday kind of folks. Our neighbors. Probably a lot like us. Me. You.
“The hardest step is to get out the door,” Del Scharffenberg counsels. “The weather always looks worse from insides than once you’re out in it. Always.”
This life is a test. It is only a test.
Had it been an actual life, you would have received further instructions.
On where to go. And what to do. – Alyce Cornyn-Selby
Epilogue. The Legendary Rob Strasser once called me a “fitness fascist.”
As for fanaticism, whenever I want to remind myself about possibilities, I recall the summer of ’75, sleeping on the floor of the Alpineer and taking twenty-four credit hours and maintaining a four-point-oh while running one-hundred-and-seventeen (117) miles – in a week – as fast as I could at seven thousand feet above sea level. Flagstaff, when running was young.
That guy! That guy, I want to be that guy again. Whoever the hell he was.
Just for a little while.
Sometimes I can do it in my head.
But that’s another story.
