Road to 40: Part 1
It’s June of 2022 and I’m feeling pretty good about my 39th year on this floating Billiard ball we call earth. I can honestly say that last year was my most successful professional year thus far; I feel like I’m “Dading” pretty solidly but have room for improvement, and that this will be a good year to be a better partner to my wonderful girlfriend and focus more on us. The 39th Annual Celebration of Miguel just passed and I gotta say, I enjoyed it. I don’t feel old, I’m comfortable with my grays, and I feel like I’m contributing to my multiple tribes. I can look at myself in the mirror and own my success, admit to the areas of my life that need work, and feel like I have a good plan to continue being a respectable human.
Why am I sharing this with you and why should you care? Well because I’m on the path to 40. I don’t care what anyone says about “40 is the new 30”; 40 is a benchmark for humans. It hits us all differently and brings about a kind of change when it comes to how people see us. At 40, most people aren’t saying, “Ehh, you’re still young”. They’re saying things like, “you haven’t started *insert fake surprised comment about investment, retirement, or health task here*.” 40 is a time of true adulting and “gotten-it-togetherness”. For a lot of people, 40 means aches and pains, cholesterol meds, and dialing things down because, “I’m not as young as I once was, but I’m well-seasoned and wiser.”
I say forget all of that because that’s not what 40 is going to look like for me! I promised myself a few years ago that I would be in the best shape of my life before I was 40. That was 2017, shortly before I started down a path I would have never expected. That year I made a decision to walk away from a middle management position, where I was a top-performing Fitness Manager and the District Fitness Captain; which translates to the fitness manager that was in charge of keeping all the other fitness managers motivated without any authority or support from any of the other 30 managers in the district. Under my “guidance” the district hit fitness 100s across the board for the first time. I was a rising star.
Why on earth would I be stepping away from all these incoming opportunities? It’s really simple, I was barely scraping by, I was 25 lbs overweight, and I was miserable. They used to call the position a Fatness Manager because you were so overworked you’d never have time to do the one thing you were trying to help others do: get fit and be healthy.
Turned out to be one of the many good decisions I would begin making over the course of the next few years.
Fast forward to the spring of 2018. I had stepped away from that position and returned to being a Personal Trainer, my real passion. I had dropped just about all the weight I had gained, started taking better care of myself, and was back to training people. I was one of the guys in the gym known for having some seriously crazy intense workouts.
Things were going well overall but I started having a weird feeling in my right hip. I did all the normal corrective and rehab things I could think of but I just couldn’t get it to go away. This went on for a couple of months and so I finally called my doctor, who referred me to a specialist. It was a long, frustrating process. I had to deal with a PA who insisted I simply had the start of arthritis and that there was nothing wrong with me. It took 6 months of Physical Therapy and constant badgering until I finally got cleared for an MRI. And surprise, surprise there was something going on. Did I forget to mention, while all this is going on, Elsa was pregnant?
She’s 7 months in at this point. It’s July, we’re getting one last vacay in before the baby comes. All's right with the word, except my hip. My hip is still not right with the world. Things are getting serious because we know we’re about to have a creature with our combined might about to come into the world. Think Dragon Ball Z Fusion status. We’re both floating at the end of 35 here. Definitely older than the average parent and, prior to this point, had only discussed fur babies in the form of K9s; no cats in this household. Unsettling stuff when you are about to be a new father.
Everyone’s experience is different when they’re a new father. My difference was that I grew up without my father. He was murdered when I was 4. In truth, I may have dodged a bullet by not having much exposure to the atmosphere he was in and my mom did a good job of keeping me out of it until his unfortunate death. So I was primarily raised by my 18-year-old mother, my grandma, and my grandpa. Gramps was old school, for the most part, women raise the kids, and men work or fix things. But I was his number one guy, so I spent quality time with him, working in the yard, fixing stuff, and going to meet the boys for coffee at the local McDonald’s. I think that’s probably what I remember most. So this is my blueprint for fatherly provision. Move, work, provide, and protect It’s more refined, more thought out, and a much softer version but it’s still present. Call it what you want but any man my age knows what I’m talking about. So in November of 2018, I met with the surgeon about possibilities of how to go about it. We exhausted them all and by Jan 2019 I was in surgery for what was supposed to be a labrum tear and came out with my hip bone shaved my hip flexor split in half, and lots of painful inflammation.
To be continued...
