30 Days to a Better Man, Day 26: take the Marine Corps fitness test

[pant, pant]

Well, I'm back.

[whew]

I took the test and the results are in. I now know precisely how out of shape I am. The only bright side to this humiliation is that I knew it was coming. I scrolled down through the list of challenges back in early January just to see what I was in for, and I saw this one and groaned. Physical fitness is, bar none, the area in which I am the least manly. I'm a flabby, wheezing blob. The last time I was in decent shape was when I was thirteen and in the High Desert Youth Soccer League.

I've always hated physical exertion. Some people get high on it, but I despise it. Even playing sports is barely tolerable for me. I am an imaginative fellow, an intellectual and bookish daydreamer, and to me there's nothing more monotonous (both mentally and physically) than putting my muscles, heart and lungs through their paces. I've heard a lot of runners and bicyclists claim that they get into "the zone," let their mind wander and get all calm and meditative and blabbity blabbity blah. Not me, no sir. To me it's just torture. Moreover, I'm an Epicurean and a hedonist. I love food and booze. But the better it tastes the more unhealthy it is. (Korean food is a notable exception to this, which is why I was able to drop 20 pounds in 2008-2009 by eating Korean and taking long walks by the Gohyeon River. I've since gained it all back.)

I know that this is no excuse for being out of shape, but I'm just explaining my position.

Okay. Ready for a good laugh? The maximum score on the Marine Corps fitness test is 300. To attain this score, you have to do at least 20 pull-ups (without a time limit), 100 crunches (in two minutes or less), and run three miles in 18 minutes.

My score was 70. 

A measly 70 points. 

Good grief.

Here were the final figures: 

• pull-ups: nearly 1
• crunches: 70 (guess where all of my points came from?)
• 3-mile run: 47 minutes

I'd previously marked out a five-kilometer (3.1-mile) course near my apartment, along the riverside jogging paths in Hangang Park: Gwangnaru Station to Gangbyeon Station, then across the Jamsil Railway Bridge, then back upstream to the foot of the Gwangjin Bridge. I'd never run it before today, however, and that might have been my undoing. I'd been doing all my training at the gym, and those dang treadmills must have been lying to me, because according to their little digital readouts I can do five kilometers in 40 minutes flat. But for some reason it took me nearly 50 today. Maybe I didn't mark it out properly, I don't know.

The other mistake I made was to do the pull-ups (well, pull-up, singular) first. Humiliation is not the best feeling to have when you're starting a 3-mile run. Needless to say, I was feeling mighty low by the time I got back to the apartment. The crunches helped bolster my self-esteem a little bit, but then I went on The Art of Manliness's Day 26 page and discovered that I'd run so slowly and was so pathetic at pull-ups that I hadn't even scored a single point. My score came solely from my crunches, and that's it.

Whoof. Where's the whiskey?

Oh well. A real man shakes humiliation off and tries harder. I still intend to be able to run three miles in 18 minutes someday (and by "someday" I mean sometime this year). I'm going to have to try a lot harder though. It looked to me like I was running my head off this afternoon, but I didn't even score. Sheesh. Pathetic. In the shape I am now, I can do 0.6 kilometers nonstop (barely 0.37 miles).

Baby steps, baby steps.

Jog on back for Day 27.