Advice to my younger self

Get in shape, stay in shape, don’t make any excuses.

If you spend enough time on the internet, you see every old fart tell you the same thing - you’ve got take care of your health, and nothing should get in the way. They would all trade their wealth for better health. So why is that most of us suck at staying healthy in the pursuit of happiness?

I don’t have an answer, but I do have a hypothesis — we live in a dream.

When I got injured this year, my physical therapist got me to do all kinds of body-weight exercises to rehab the knee, and man, it was hard. Turns out, even just slowly lifting your legs from the floor is hard, if you do it slow enough. wtf? It’s been six months, and I try to hit the gym every day, and I am still weak.

Yeah, before the accident I was skiing like I was still in my 20s - fast, aggressive, with respawn available on demand. I was used to how my legs would work in the time when I was running marathons, and it was totally unexpected that in time of need the legs didn’t cooperate. If I could still bend into a pretzel, I would’ve been just fine, but my legs said no.

We put my wife on a Peloton the other day and she was ready to die after 20 minutes. This is a woman that used to do spinning classes in the morning.

It seems like this is a common thread. Everyone goes through this, thinking they are young, only to be jolted awake that they are not. I know some of my readers are approaching their geriatric age, while some are just out of diapers. It doesn’t matter where you are on this spectrum because the age bracket is just a moving window.

Basically, you will never be as young as you were yesterday. Duh! So, get out there and walk, run, get a jump rope, swim, get up and down from a chair … do something. Just do it ;)

-Kirill.

---

p.s. Here’s that article I wrote on getting injured and learning about my condition via Grok and an MRI tool that I built. You might enjoy it -