Sorry for the long delay, my precious two readers from Germany. I have decided to keep posting whatever I find time to write, even if it's just a stupid email to assuage the anger of an acquaintance.
What I have here is an email I sent to assuage the anger of an acquaintance. As you may have noticed from my Athlete Profile (link along the top!), I go to a CrossFit gym. During a recent workout I was caught shaving a rep or two. I honestly didn't even know I had done this myself. In my ridiculously fatigued state I had just lost count. Instead of bringing it up at the time, the owner of the gym decided to be a complete dick to me for two weeks straight, even going so far as to set up a head-to-head rematch of the workout with me. When I finally asked him what was up he told me his panties were in a twist because of the aforementioned rep shaving (that, again, I didn't even mean to do). After a lecture about cheating at the gym (from a guy who uses steroids, by the way), I realized that I really didn't care either way.
This is what happens when one person (him) takes something insanely seriously and the other person doesn't really care at all. The problem, I realized, is that I was going to have to deal with this guy outwardly being a dick to me for the foreseeable future. Or take the easy way out an fake an apology. So I apologized for something I didn't even purposely do.
In the course of calling me a liar, this guy made me become one to get him off my back.
The email is below, if only because I think there's some decent stuff about morality in there. Of course I included some veiled jabs at him, but I feel like there's already been way too much explanation.
Apology In Three Parts
Brian,
I write from Senegal. That is apropos of nothing, but I thought it was an awesome way to start.
I'm sure you expected this at some point since we've been through all this before, but I'm writing to apologize for both my actions in the gym and then adamantly denying them to you. It was neither right nor smart on my part. I hope at some point you can accept this apology. There will be a lot of rambling; skip to the last paragraph if you wish.
I. To Assume Guilt
I can't sleep. I haven't been able to for weeks. It's only really an issue when I'm tackling paperwork or must fly for extended periods of time. After we spoke it was worse than ever. I previously used your gym as a way to stave off the depression of spending most of my twenties in shitty deserts five thousand miles away. Evidently that was not working any longer. I, much like Matt Damon's bi-polar character in The Informant!, refused to escape the comfy little fiction that I had created in my own head. Almost how Barry Bonds refuses to admit he's taken steroids. He's manufactured a world where he is his own ideal, and if that ideal is shattered, then so is he. To everyone else it is cheating, but he's convinced himself that he is above that. From the outside of this world it looks almost comical, from the inside it's too painful to let go of the fiction. A sinking feeling manifests itself in the darkest corners of our ego, the parts that know if you played in the marching band or used to collect Magic: The Gathering cards or were on the academic challenge team. It's the only part that knows the true you. This is where that overwhelming remorse grows until you realize you are not what you say you are.
Guilt.
That is what I was feeling, only it had taken me too long to figure it out. Guilt for being dishonest with you, then throwing it back in your face when you tried to get me to come clean. It was more of a personal failing than a public one, but again, it's shattered the fictional world which I had made for myself. That one in which I was still a decent man.
II. Of Slippery Slopes
It's been happening for weeks. A little after I came back from the last deployment. There were new people in the gym-- bigger, stronger, faster. But that wasn't it. As I said and I still maintain, I am not incredibly competitive. I couldn't stand to be. It pays to be competitive at the top. In the middle, it just makes you angry and strive for something that you'll never reach. I'm not competitive, except with myself, that is. And I was slipping. My lifts were down. My times were up. I was gassed and nursing more than a few injuries. The wonderful story that I told everyone with the fervor of an evangelical, how CrossFit makes you continually better, was proving to be a fallacy for me. I was plateauing before the plunge. Maybe it's because Nick was gone. He and I were always close enough that we pushed each other, working out side by side until each of us was better (something I'm sure you echo with the loss of Chris). That is most likely externalizing a personal failure, but whatever it was, I was losing ground fast. I could no longer say that I was better than the year prior.
It began almost innocently enough. I had never really been a cheater before. Not on girlfriends, not in school, and not in financial dealings. They say the first step is the hardest. That's true unless you don't even know you're taking it. Everyone over Sesame Street age can count. It's hard to imagine the type of stress or strain that could lead one to forget, but it is possible. I was exercising, only twenty to go. OK, that's eight, six, and six. Except I could only do seven on the next set. Fine, I'll do seven then five. Or seven then three then two. Except it was four. OK, almost there. Four more then two. Then I yelled TIME! I lay on the ground gasping for air. When it came back to me, I realized that in all the segmenting and creating rep schemes and wanting to vomit up a lung I had missed two reps. I looked around. Nobody seemed to notice. No harm, no foul. I went about my day.
But then it became easier and easier to do so again. Realizing halfway through medball cleans that I had accidentally been counting two for one (there are two squats and two hip openings after all), and not knowing how long I had been doing it. Was it just the last few reps, or the last ten? Then it was fucking up the last double under as I called time, but not going back to fix it. Then it just got to be pure laziness. Do a big set, then do a couple more smaller ones. Eh, that's probably good enough. I didn't think it had made a big difference. I was barely even counting anymore. But my sloth had proven me deficient when you counted for me. What I thought was probably pretty close was evidently not very close at all. I was so entwined with this fiction that I was probably doing the correct (or at least very near the correct) number of reps, that when you set up the little sting operation, I had no qualms about attacking the workout again. I figured that I would have a repeat performance. Karma, along with a lack of sleep, nutrition, and hydration conspired against me. I gassed. Hard. I had never bonked like that before, but I tumbled right off the cliff. I wanted to attribute it to my sporadic sleep cycle, my disdain for the competitive throwdown in general, the fact that I didn't eat all day, or that I was too preoccupied with flying overseas that night. I wanted to place the blame anywhere but where it deserved to be. On me. Evidently those reps that I was too lazy to count, what ended up being the last three or four or ten (who knows?) per round where the ones that made the workout worthwhile. What could be worse?
Lying. Compounding the personal failure of cheating myself into lying about it to you. It's easy to see that men aren't born evil, but they aren't very many decisions away from becoming it. Between an honest man and a deplorable one are many doors, more for some than others. Each little lie or cheat or steal opens a door. Each subsequent door gets a little easier to open from the experience of opening the last one. Eventually, the honest man has passed through too many of these little doors and finds himself in a situation in which he cannot cope and reacts violently. This is the slippery slope that creates criminals, or in my case, a liar. I danced with semantics telling you that I had never intended to shave reps. I would never purposely count to 27 and stop. And that was true, I wasn't really counting at all. Except that it was an obstruction to truth. It was lawyering and helped me maintain the fiction that I so wanted to believe. That one that said I wasn't a liar and a cheat. That's how a simple thing like cheating became a slippery slope to lying and probably losing a friend.
III. On Moving Forward
I don't know where this will lead me. Hopefully it will make me work toward becoming a better person. Humans, after all, are Pavlovian in many respects. When we do something good and get rewarded, we want to do it again. If we do this enough times it becomes our nature. Conversely, if we do something bad and get disciplined, it should deter us from doing it again. Except honesty and other complex moral decisions don't always work that way. Many times it takes years for those lessons to bear their fruits. In the meantime the liar and cheat may have become rich or the righteous man may have ben killed for his beliefs. In these cases, it's hard understand the Pavlovian trigger, but it's there. This negative consequence, my falling out with you, will hopefully prove vital toward keeping me on the straight and narrow in the future.
Whether that future holds CrossFit or working out at all, I can't say. I have been finding it hard to go in the gym since that is the site of such a profound personal (and slightly public) failure of character. I can say for certain that you have good people in the gym. When becoming a cheater, you are paranoid. You watch others, count their reps, and hope that you aren't the only one. If you find another cheater but they call you out, you can counter-accuse. For a while there is a strange truce. You grow even to like the other cheater. But their lie reflects your lie. You worry if they're caught then you will be too. So then you grow to hate them. It's a strange twist of the psyche, but one that happens nonetheless. In my counting phase I noticed a few cheaters. Not as many as you would think, unless you think that I was the only one, in which case slightly more than you think. By and large, however, the gym you run is an honest one, and it's these honest people that I hurt the most. These are the people that cheer for you (even though I hate that part) when you're barely able to move. These are the people that offer you advice when you need it. But more importantly, these are the people who measure themselves against you. People who are killing themselves in order to get better. And by not counting my reps, whether I intended to or not, I made it harder on them. My inability to see past myself rendered me unable to realize that I was hurting others and that was wrong.
I told you on the phone that this had happened once before in my gym back in Seattle. It was a partner workout. My partner hopped up and did his ten pull-ups, except on the last one his chin did not quite get over the bar. He hopped down and said, ten. I didn't say anything. A few rounds later, the exact same thing happened on my last pull-up. He nodded slyly and we moved on. At the end of the workout, our coach came by and told us, you each owe me another pull-up, and to the team next to us, and you each owe me four kettlebell swings. It was subdued but to the point. We knew that our coach saw us as cheaters, and furthermore, that the other team knew we were cheaters too. Praise in public, punish in private. Unfortunately, this latest instance became slightly more heated and incredibly less private. I'm not sure where that will leave me. I can't be certain that I want to continue in an endeavor that tempts me to lie, whether it be for competition's sake, or just to make it stop quicker. Even if standing up to that temptation is probably the quickest way to steel oneself against it.
To end, I want to say it again. I'm sorry I cheated and I'm sorry I insisted I didn't. It was laziness and stupidity and it was wrong. I cheated myself and everyone else and failed to uphold the standards which should come so easily at this point. Evidently the part of my CrossFit game that was failing was mental toughness, not physical acuity. I'm sorry to you, and more importantly, I'm sorry to the other members. I'm trying to move on, if not for me, then at least to sleep. I hope you are able to do the same. I would appreciate if you would keep this message private. It was intended only for you, and probably more so, for me. This was a personal failing, and one that does not need to be hashed out publicly. Your discretion is appreciated.
Thanks for your time,
-cullen
p.s. I still don't know what the fuck a yoga pushup is.
