Before scrolling your mouse down any further, I need you to first click on the YouTube link below to watch a hi-def clip from the original 1976 film Rocky, which, in my opinion, is the ONLYRocky. In fact, the next time you find yourself in Philly, don't ask anyone how to find the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which is the mistake I made, and nobody has a clue where the Museum of Art is at. Instead, just yell out, "Hey yo! Any of you's know how to find the Rocky Steps?!" You'll get a reply. There's exactly 72 steps in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (a.k.a. "The Rocky Steps") that Rocky Balboa and his dog, Butkis, soared up in the 1976 filming.

And my main point in showing you the clip below is this - The original 1976 character of Rocky Balboa is the epitome of the fundamental, suffering, drug-free "hard gainer." Observe how much Rocky suffers, plodding out into the cold Philadelphia streets in nothing but gray cotton sweats to run in, and then as he lumbers up, cramping, in his first attempt to conquer the infamous "Steps." The 1976 Rocky is the ultimate code hero. As Stuart McRobert says, and as you'll take note of in the clip below, "It’s the hard gainer who has far greater obstacles to mount . . . The use of the word “champion” is misleading . . . The “real” champions are those who built themselves up from runts—without drugs and without divorcing themselves from everyday life."

If the embedded clip below takes too long to load, then just click these words to watch directly from YouTube

A few weeks ago, not too long before Christmas was closing in, I came down with an upper-respiratory infection. And if I’m gonna’ get sick, I’m only gonna’ come down with one thing—that! You’ve gotta’ be downright freaking hearty to train for twelve months in West Texas . . . We’ve already had three snows in this low-level desert since Thanksgiving, and when the Northern cold fronts sock it to us, they layer this joint with a bedspread of allergies.

My lungs are so susceptible to infection when the dust bowl here starts churning because I have a slight case of asthma to begin with, not to mention, I worked in a dirt-ridden cotton gin for several years while attending college (and ended up managing one afterwards), and my allergies are so sensitive that if a driver is smoking a cigarette in their car and they pass me out on a road while I’m riding my bike, I’ll sneeze.

So, there’s only one thing for the doctor to do in order to “fix me right up,” as he likes to say: Hit me with the good stuff. This time around, the infection was buried deep in my lungs, so the doc said he had to give me some type of stout cortisone-steroid injection to zap the infection.

That shot led me to pulling a tattered book from the shelf today that I’ve had for over seventeen years. The book is titled Brawn, and I haven’t held its broken spine in my hands in at least ten years. So why, all of a sudden, did I seek out its advice today?

Because I lurched out into the cold this morning to run . . . And it hurt. Freaking bad. If you ask a long-distance runner “What exactly is it, that hurts?” they’ll respond even more emphatically with, “It!”

Definition of IT: your core; your innermost being; your soul; your entire body-mind-spirit connection. When you run long enough or far enough, eventually, IT’ll hurt. And in his book Born to Run, Christopher McDougall explains why:

“Athletes whose sport involves running put enormous strain on their legs.” That’s what the Sports Injury Bulletin has declared. “Each footfall hits one of their legs with a force equal to more than twice their body weight. Just as repeated hammering on an apparently impenetrable rock will eventually reduce the stone to dust, the impact loads associated with running can ultimately break down your bones, cartilage, muscle, tendons, and ligaments.” A report by the American Association of Orthopedic Surgeons concluded that distance running is “an outrageous threat to the integrity of the knee.”

And instead of “impenetrable rock,” that outrage is banging down on one of the most sensitive points in your body. You know what kind of nerves are in your feet? The same ones that network into your genitals. Your feet are like a minnow bucket full of sensory neurons, all of them wriggling around in search of sensation. Stimulate those nerves just a little, and the impulse will rocket through your entire nervous system; that’s why tickling your feet can overload the switchboard and cause your whole body to spasm.

And, well, there you have it. And it hurt so bad this morning for me that I wanted an easy way out. I wanted another shot from my doc. So, when I got home, I needed to re-read the opening pages of Brawn to remind myself of how, in 1992, Stuart McRobert’s passion for natural, hard-gaining bodybuilding changed my life forever.

In 1991, Stuart McRobert published a book titled Brawn: Bodybuilding for the Drug-Free and Genetically Typical. And although the copy I bought in 1992 mostly rests on my bookshelf these days, I used to read it so voraciously that I could practically recite entire passages from it and even tell you what page numbers they came from.

One of my childhood Baptist preachers always used to say, “You can always tell how good a’ shape a man’s soul is in by looking at the shape of his bible.” In my late teens and early twenties, the cover of my bible had a few distinguished wrinkles in it, but yet, almost all 230 pages of my Brawn book were stained with sweat. Subsequently, I’d grown some pretty decent triceps.

Actually, during my first semester of college in 1992, I was required to take a class called Old Testament Survey (the cool kids on campus christened it as “OTS”) at Hardin-Simmons University, a private Baptist school in Abilene, Texas, and we studied every single sentence in the Old Book. So, I can’t honestly say that I wasn’t racking the dumbbells to maintain a smidgen of spiritual fitness.

And by the way, there’s things in the Old Testament that rival Hollywood: If it hadn’t been for OTS, I would’ve never known that a dude got tent-staked in the head way back in the day. It’s in the Book of Judges, Chapter four, verse twenty-one: “But Heber's wife, Jael, picked up a tent stake and a hammer. She went quietly over to Sisera. He was lying there, fast asleep. He was very tired. She drove the stake through his head right into the ground. So he died.”

Awesome.

To this day, OTS remains as one of the most daunting classes I’ve ever taken. Besides Basic College Spanish, in which the only phrases I learned were a handful of versatile traveling tips: Deme cuarenta litros de regular. Puedo estacionar el auto aqui? Give me forty liters of regular. May I park the car here? Stuff like that. Anyhow, back in 1992, I eventually finagled all the notes for Old Testament Survey from an upper-class girl, which gave me a heap more amount of time for reading and applying Brawn.

I’d always been a runt of a kid, so as a late-teen I threw myself into bodybuilding mostly . . . to attract chicks. I wasted hours of my life ogling feathery-light girls in bikinis sitting on top of Lee Haney’s biceps in my stacks of bodybuilding magazines: Ironman, Flex, and Muscle & Fitness. And I thought that big muscles and snagging broads in bikinis were the result of big work, big weights, big hours in the gym. If I could only rescue the years that I squandered heaving, hoeing, pushing, pulling, and tossing all those weights around, the wrong way, the "easy gainer" way.

I still love to lift, and the weights have blossomed into an essential ingredient of my long-distance training. But now, I use the barbells for psychological reasons rather than using them to attract females. When the last thing I want to do is throw on my running shoes or mount my bike, I’ll usually always beckon to the call of clinking weights.

Most of the time, I have to trick my body and mind into wanting to train; otherwise, I’ll only remember how bad it hurts, and I’ll stop putting myself out onto the porch in the cold dawn. One little trick that I perform on my psyche is laying out different long courses for myself to run around our unusually hilly West Texas town, and I use convenience stores as my personal aid stations.

This morning, I did what I call my “Rocky Steps.” One out-and-back (from my front porch to the top of the “Steps,” which is an abandoned amphitheater that’s stacked from top to bottom with a colossal bedrock stairwell and used only once a year for the local Fourth of July celebration) takes roughly one-hour-and-fifteen-minutes, while holding about a seven-minute-mile pace.

Now, how could I talk about my personal "Rocky Steps" here in West Texas and then not post-up one of the most famous scenes in all of Hollywood cinema?! You knew it was coming, didn't you?

If the embedded clip below takes too long to load, then just click these words to watch directly from YouTube

This morning, I did my “steps” course two times, which is probably somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty miles. Decent mileage. But the second time around, IT hurt! And I know what you’re thinking: He must’ve gorged himself on pecan pie during Christmas. That’s all it is! The pecan pie! Well, yes and no. I did eat about three-quarters of a pecan pie all to myself on Christmas Day, but hey, my dog and me were still pounding the pavement around the Twelve Days of Christmas. So the pecan pie—no biggie.

No, let me tell you, the real reason why I hurt so bad this morning is because I came off my high from the cortisone-steroid shot the doctor gave me just before Christmas. And yes, I’m guilty: Because this morning, I wanted another one. For just a couple of weeks while the drug was inside me, it was so much easier, and nothing hurt. I was a machine that could go forever. And now, it’s gone, and I’m back to who I was pre-shot—I’m the “hard gainer” all over again.

And that’s why I had to dust off my copy of Brawn today. I needed Stuart McRobert to remind me that—as just the fella’ that I am, the average gym member, the guy who is by far not a champion, the rider and runner who’s the most unlikely professional in the game—my willingness to step out into the cold dawn, drug-free, to suffer and hurt for more years to come to achieve the slightest bit of personal victory is a noble endeavor, as compared to the glossiest magazined champion who takes the easy way out.

Although the following passage from Stuart McRobert pertains to bodybuilding, I believe it speaks volumes to a society that’s crazed with revering million-dollar-making athletes whose characters and pharmaceutical aid go unchecked and ignored, while it’s forgotten that America’s founding fathers of sport were all ultimate “hard gainers” who inspired millions of fans, set still-standing records, broke bones, played and punched for scraps, and even went off to fight in World Wars (heavy weight champion boxer James Braddock, and thirty-five members of the Baseball Hall of Fame served in World War II, such as Jackie Robinson, Joe DiMaggio, and Yogi Berra, just to name a few). Stuart McRobert writes:

A hard gainer is someone who finds making gains in size and strength [endurance and stamina] hard to come by. It’s a broad category encompassing almost all bodybuilders and lifters [long-distance runners and cyclists]. Who doesn’t find gains difficult?

Some hard gainers find gains more difficult to make than do others. Just how “hard” a hard gainer you are, only you can know. The harder you find gaining to be, the more thought you need to give to the interpretations of training needed to get you to gain . . .

The failure rate of aspiring bodybuilders is enormous. Attend a gym for a few months and watch the change in the clientele. A hard core remains, but the others come and go . . . Of the hard core that maintains its membership, how many make progress from year to year? Very few.

As long as we maintain a mentality of, “That’s not how Arnold did it,” or “That’s not how Lee Haney does it,” then we’ll get nowhere but into a well of frustration and despair.

I know more than a bit about this well of frustration and despair. I’ve been in it, and stewed in it, for years. I spent the second half of my teenaged years, together with later years, utterly consumed by bodybuilding. If following the dedication, resolve, and training methods of the champions was the key to success, I’d have been up there competing with the best of them. I never was, and never can be . . . I have dragged, I mean dragged my protesting and barely receptive body from that of a runt to respectability by normal gym standards.

I know what it’s like to be as dedicated—if not more so—than a Mr. Olympia contestant . . . I’ve been so miserable at the sight of so little reward for so much effort and dedication that, in my early years of training, I’ve wept.

Bodybuilding results follow from the use of practical and appropriate training methods. Such methods follow on from a realistic set of expectations. Such a set of expectations doesn’t come from imbibing the achievements and training lifestyle of the drug-using and genetically gifted top-title contestants.

Realistic achievements don’t mean paltry achievements. Far from it. The achievements of a successful typical gym member—a successful hard gainer—are extremely impressive. Though modest relative to the professional bodybuilders, they are fantastic relative to untrained people and bodybuilding neophytes.

In fact, a successful hard gainer has climbed a bigger mountain than has a successful easy gainer. Though the latter develops greater size and strength than the former, it’s the hard gainer who has far greater obstacles to mount . . . The use of the word “champion” is misleading . . . The “real” champions are those who built themselves up from runts—without drugs and without divorcing themselves from everyday life. Though not entering any contests, and getting no publicity in magazines, these are the real champions.

-cadet

11th Place Overall - 2007 Nat'l Ultra Endurance Series

2nd Place Overall - 2008 State of TX MTB Marathon Series

Cadet and Lance Armstrong - Miles of DisComfort