We arrived at the Grand Canyon just as the sun was setting.
We had driven up from Phoenix but got a late start. We always get a late start.
So now we made it to the rim just as the shadows got long.
There is a visual trick that occurs when you are in front of something as vast as the Grand Canyon when the sun goes down. It’s as if the entire thing flattens out. And what, just minutes before felt like an eternity away, feels like it’s in reach. As if the other side of this massive thing is suddenly right in front of you.
The night before our wedding my wife and I strolled arm-and-arm up Henry Street in Brooklyn to the original Grimaldi’s Pizza for our last meal as an engaged couple. The surprisingly mild Fall suddenly turned chilly as we took the long walk full of excitement and hope.
And, because of this, we now have an annual tradition of getting pizza for our anniversary every year. This marked the 25th year of us getting pizza together.
(Technically it’s 26 years as this is our 25 anniversary, but you have to allow me the dramatic license here)
We’ve also added another tradition. Post-pizza we sit on the couch and look at our wedding pictures and our honeymoon album. All taken back in the day when you took photos on a camera and developed the film and slipped them into a spiral bound book filled with plastic top-loading sleeves.
And it’s lovely. But it also becomes increasingly strange. The distance between where we currently are and who we were back then continues to increase. Who are the kids in those pictures? Where did they go? They look familiar but also odd. As if they’ve been put through some sort of filter or AI that’s made everything slightly uncanny.
As I’ve mentioned in the past, I am contractually obligated to at least mention fitness in these blogs. And sometimes the bridge I build is tenuous at best. But, maybe surprisingly (while, admittedly, being a bit trite) the link is actually not that hard this week.
Because, if you train long enough, your workouts will also look surprisingly unrecognizable compared to where you start.
I’ll use myself as an example.
When I first went to the gym after deciding I needed to, funny enough, lose weight for my upcoming wedding, I spent all my time on the first floor of Body Elite, a local Brooklyn gym, sweating it out on the treadmills, elliptical machines, StairMasters and any other piece of cardio equipment that were scattered in front of the bank of televisions serving as a welcome distraction during the 60 minutes of steady-state that I was performing three times per week.
From there it was up to the third floor and the large group fitness room which was mostly cardio-kickboxing and brutal 45-minute long jump rope classes.
I then found myself in the weight room, banging out heavy dips during my chest-and-triceps day and following any bodybuilding routine I could find.
Serious bodybuilders didn’t train at gyms that even offered cardio-kickboxing classes so I changed gyms and signed up to Gold’s where I lifted heavy and made friends with both ex-cons and the lawyers who defended them.
When I started working at Peak Performance I was exposed to a more athletic-based training model where range of motion, power and reactivity and total body training were the norm.
From there I got into Olympic Weightlifting and competed in several meets - including a few national and international competitions where I perpetually finished just off the podium in fourth place.
And lastly, I’ve religiously followed The Fort program which combines both strength training and conditioning which has improved my strength, body composition and has prepared me for endurance events such as Hyrox.
Quite the journey, and I know you’ve been captivated by every moment of it. But the point is, if you stay in the game long enough, your training will and must progress.
You will learn and apply the knowledge that comes along the way. Your goals and interests might change. If nothing else, age will play a role in what and how much you are able to do.
And that’s okay. The goal isn’t to keep training like you did at twenty-five, it’s to keep training, period. To keep learning where your edge is and where it isn’t. To know when to push and when to cruise. Progress doesn’t always look like more weight or faster times. Sometimes it looks like showing up with more wisdom and focus. Sometimes it looks like doing the same thing with more purpose, better technique and greater intent.
We returned to the Grand Canyon early the following day as the sun shone brightly and it was just as vast as one might imagine. The trick of the previous day’s sundown had been revealed and it seemed like it would take a journey of a thousand miles to get to the other side.
And I thought about how progress, whether in training, in marriage, in parenting or in anything worth doing, really, feels the same way. Up close, it can look manageable, like the other side is right there. But when the light shifts, you realize how far you’ve come and how far there still is to go.
And that is the paradox of both time and distance. One moment everything can seem so close. And in the next so, so far away.