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I recently joined a gym for the third time in my life, and I realized in that moment that this was the first time I was doing it for the right reasons. And this will come as shocking news… the first two times were before I got sober, and the first two times were also a complete waste of time.
My first gym membership was my freshman year in college, which happens to be almost the exact time that my addictions were unleashed. I was drinking, smoking, dabbling in drugs and lifting weights. My one goal was to get into the best shape possible so that I could then get drunk so I would be able to talk to women. Then I wanted as many hookups as possible.
I had a good year in the gym. I got into the best shape of my life, and I was 19 years old so I didn’t have the dad bod going yet. But that wasn’t very spiritual, and it wasn’t very sustainable. So by year two of college, I had stopped going to the gym… and my drinking and smoking and chewing Skoal had doubled. If you’re pondering for a second if a person really could smoke and chew tobacco at the same time… trust me, it’s possible, and it is disgusting. That made for some nasty moments hugging a toilet bowl at 2 am.
The second gym membership I got was when I was 25 years old, living in New York City. I had moved there with my girlfriend (now my wife), and I had begun to drink and use painkillers in a way that started to scare me. I had known that I liked getting drunk or high a little more than normal people by then, and now I had begun to drift into needing to do it almost every night.
I was in that phase of addiction where I had created some rules for myself to manage my drinking. I could have two beers per night on work days as long as I went to the gym first. Then I told myself that I could go up to a six-pack on Friday and Saturday nights as long as I had gotten a workout in and I waited four hours after my last painkiller. I had this math equation in my head where one side was healthy stuff like the gym, and on the other side was the painkillers and alcohol. Somehow they equaled out.
But like all guidelines I ever established for myself… I couldn’t live up to them. My workouts got shorter and shorter because they were cutting into my drinking time. Pretty soon I let myself drink three beers per night on weekdays “to help me get to sleep easier,” and I began to count Thursday as a weekend day instead of a weeknight.
After another year or two, and my gym membership was canceled and I was getting loaded every night, regardless of whether I worked that day or had to the next day. My addiction had officially begun.
Now fast forward to 2019. I’d been sober for 11 years, and I had started to tack on a few pounds. That was causing some issues, physically and spiritually, so I bought some weights and started to work out at home. I came up with a workout plan that I was comfortable with, and it was a gradual plan. I really put some thought into it and decided I wanted to do medium-level workouts every single day to build it into a habit, rather than a quick-fix thing I would burn out from.
And I worked out at home for two-plus years, until early in 2022, when I decided to jump a notch by joining a gym. I’ve been going almost every day since then with the same goal of reasonable workouts as a daily part of my life. I won’t go too deep into the benefits of what it has added to my recovery, but the benefits are extensive. In my experience, there is a connection between my emotional, spiritual and physical wellbeing, and that when I have a good program for all three, it’s the best way for me to live my life.
Is the dad bod gone? Not really. I’m chipping away at it but I still have a little bit of that old shitty math equation, where one hour of working out means I can eat one hour’s worth of cookies every night. I don’t need a mathematics whiz to again realize that equation doesn’t quite work for this tire around my waist line. But… baby steps, right? At least I’m not hovering above the toilet with a nicotine barf explosion, and for now, I will take it.
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:
HEARD AT MEETINGS....
"Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want."
(Credit: AA Grapevine, from D.J.W. of Tukwila, Washington, July 2005)
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