When I was in the 2nd grade I created quite the stir at Clearstream Avenue Elementary when I proposed, in an assigned essay asking us our thoughts on God, that God could possibly be female.
In my writing, I referred to God as “he/she” which, apparently, was both controversial and very advanced thinking for a 7 year old boy.
You have to remember that this was more than 40 years ago. Way before anyone questioned the conventional use of pronouns and when teachers were more free to even assign this kind of work without parents flooding the school with queries about why they are asking their kids to write about their religious beliefs.
I’m probably overstating the controversy. I don’t really remember getting called down to Principal Burbell’s office (shout out Principal Burbell. You were a lovely, supportive man and I still remember you) or protests by the local church. This was a suburban town on the border of Queens and Long Island, not the bible belt.
I do, however, remember it being a bit of a big deal. The essay was put on display in the hallway during parent/teacher night. My teacher, Mrs. Russian - an unfortunate name to have during the height of the Cold War - suggested we reach out to Newsday (the newspaper of Long Island!) for a potential featurette. I don’t think they ever responded.
But the thing I remember most about the essay is that, about three paragraphs down, I referred to God as a “he” and forgot the “/she”.
“Mrs. Russian. I forgot to do it on this line. I need to write it over.”
“It’s okay, Danny. We don’t have to change it,” she sweetly replied.
But after a restless night of considering the abject horror of my friend's parents seeing my essay with this glaring mistake, I overcame my remarkable levels of shyness and insisted that I be allowed to rewrite the page.
So out came the staples from the construction paper that acted as a glued border to the loose-leaf paper that held my soon-to-be Pulitzer Prize winning essay and off the bulletin board it came. I recopied the essay during my lunch period and corrected my egregious error.
This is my very first memory of having an obsessive nature.
Now, let me get a couple of things straight off the bat. I do not have, nor have I ever had, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. And neither do most people who claim to “be so OCD”. OCD is a real disease that can paralyze people who are truly afflicted with it.
Liking your drinking glasses to be lined up in size order in your cupboard means that you are neat. Needing to check the cupboard exactly 17 times to make sure the glasses are in order before you can leave your house is a disorder.
Perhaps I am closer to being a perfectionist but I don’t think that truly describes it either. I’m not fearful or avoid the making of mistakes. I actually think mistakes and failures are necessary for growth. To never make a mistake is to never progress and I’m very attracted to progress.
For sure the story of my essay would make you think that I have a perfectionist streak in me, but I think that’s just how my seven-year-old self expressed my obsessiveness.
As I’ve gotten older this has morphed into me practicing things over and over and over again. Whether in real life or simply visualizing it in my mind. When I played high school basketball I was the first one in the gym and the last to leave. When I wasn’t in the gym I was in my driveway practicing everything from post moves to rebounds. When I didn’t have a ball in my hands I was visualizing my free throws or my elbow position on my jump shots.
When I was competing in Olympic Weightlifting it was more of the same. As if tough training sessions and multi-hour long sessions in the gym weren’t enough I would fall asleep thinking about pulling positions or how to keep the bar closer.
I still wake up every morning and practice guitar for 45 minutes or so. I’ll go over the same scales or songs or pieces of songs over and over and over again.
Now, it would be one thing if any of these pursuits potentially yielded some substantial reward. If there was a college scholarship or chance of making an Olympic team or a try out to be the new guitarist in Van Halen, then this might make sense.
But all these pursuits were purely recreational and took a back seat to school work or work work or being a family man.
This begs the question “what gives”? And I’d be damned if I knew. I’m a meathead, not a therapist. And while I am certain that this behavior is not common, I also don’t believe it’s rare.
I’m sure many of you out there are unconsciously nodding your head as you think about how you too apply this behavior to your golf swing or cake baking or computer coding or whatever else drives your obsessions.
All this leads me to the pragmatic turn that accompanies these weekly ramblings that find their way into your inbox: how do we harness this type of character trait when it comes to training and what are the potential pitfalls?
In the plus column I would say that the obsessive component of my nature has led us to have some really interesting and effective programs. Continually spinning the variables in my head has really driven some creativity in the constraints that accompany the rules of exercise science. It would be very easy to give up the ghost and just produce rote programs that make sense but don’t get you excited to train. Luckily for our community, the “story of the program” is something that plays out in my mind for weeks before the first exercise or rep range is put into our training app.
I am a big believer that the pursuit of optimal technique is what maximizes results. So being obsessive about foot pressure, bar path, general biomechanics and other things that most gym-goers never even consider has given me a real advantage in gaining strength and improving body composition.
I was in a hotel gym recently training around some younger, strong-ish guys with the benefit of having mirrors at my disposal. (For those of you who haven’t been to The Fort, our gym has no mirrors). The one thing that really became clear to me as I watched myself and my unwitting ‘training partners’ all working out is that I can perform the exercises with much, much better technique than they can. This is partly due to experience, for sure. But I’d say it’s more of a result of my putting a lot of mental energy towards considering how things should be executed.
When I initially lost about 60 pounds, altering my nutrition habits was also benefited by my obsessive nature. Structuring my food intake and considering my macronutrient breakdowns made my results very predictive. And if there is anything I love it’s a specific effort yielding a specific result.
But just as obsessive program design and movement consideration have real benefits, they can just as easily hamstring you into “majoring in the minor”. In other words, if the obsession leads to paralysis you run the risk of not taking any action if it isn’t perfect action. And, last I checked, no one I know has gotten better at training solely by thinking about training.
And, famously, food obsessions can easily lead to disordered eating and a bad relationship with food for some people (although I would also argue that never considering what you are eating leads to a worse relationship with food for most people, but that is a discussion for another post). But let’s not gloss over this.For some people, thinking about food and its effects too much can be quite dangerous.
Forty years out from writing that essay the thought that God would even have a gender is silly to me. I also believe that my obsessive nature has probably benefited me in massive ways while also creating a mental prison at the same time.
Life, like training, is filled with paradoxes.
Maybe that’s the joy of both.