Later today we’ll announce the winner of this year’s fitness competition at Tribe. At this writing, there are five contenders for first place, so once again we’ll have a tiebreaker. Some years the tie breaker is a wall sit contest, or a race on a local track. This year, the team has decided it will come down to how many wads of crumpled paper each contestant can sink in a wastebasket in 60 seconds.
Our fitness competition’s long history
The photo above is from Tribe’s first fitness competition in 2008. I don’t remember what the trophies were about. I appear to be holding a softball award, and I’ve never been a softball player. However, Kim Steen, behind me with the gymnast trophy, was indeed a competitive gymnast and later started her own very successful business, Intown Tumbling. And Lindsay Podrid, to Kim’s left with the hockey trophy, does play hockey and during one fitness competition scored her first goal in a men’s league. Ben Spangler, the only guy pictured here, went from subsisting on cigarettes and coffee to being a competitive cyclist.
How it works
The rules for the Tribe fitness competition are that each person sets their highly individualized goals for weekly exercise. The only requirements are that you do three or more workouts and include cardio, strength and flexibility. Contestants are encouraged to make their goals reachable, but also difficult enough that the rest of us won’t make fun of you.
Each Monday, if you completed your workout goals for the previous week, you get a gold star. (Literally. We stick gold stars on a big chart) If you didn’t, no star. It’s a binary system, there’s no partial credit for almost reaching your weekly goal. At the end of the fitness competition, the one with the most gold stars wins $500.
My goals were different in my 40s
When we started the fitness competition in 2008, I was in my mid 40s, had recently run the New York City marathon and was doing a lot of trail runs and gym workouts. I think I worked out five times a week, and each workout was a considerable chunk of time.
Now my joints don’t love long distances or running on hard surfaces, even wooded trails, so I limit my running to weekly sprints on the Peloton Tread. My fitness competition goals this year were just three short Peloton workouts a week, including the bike and weights, along with my usual hiking and brisk walks with the dog. Easy peezy.
Peloton mantras
The Peloton instructors all have their mantras, most of them challenging people to go harder, suffer more, ignore pain. Robin Arzon, one of my favorite instructors, has some doozies like “Savagery is a lifestyle” and “But did you die?” But the one that always gets a sarcastic chuckle out of me is her Hustler’s Oath: “Do you want it more than you fear it?”
That strikes me as a young person’s motivation. When you’re in your 20s and 30s and you’re trying to figure out who you are and prove yourself professionally, that sort of language might resonate.
But in my 60s, a hard workout is not what I fear. A hard workout is how I deal with all the truly scary things in life, like our beloved dog Sally dying of cancer or my aunt’s memory beginning to diminish dramatically.
My mantra: Let it be easy
My mantra, for the Tribe fitness competition and the rest of the year, is “Let it be easy.” As Cody Rigsby, one of my other favorite Peloton instructors, says, “It’s not that deep.” In fact, letting life be easy is really why I started Tribe in the first place.
It’s easy to go downstairs and do a weight workout or a HIIT-and-hills bike ride. Even in the midst of a challenging sprint on the tread, my approach is not to push harder but to relax. Relax your shoulders, calm your breathing, let it be easy.
When you’re older, I think you’re more able to let hard things be easy. Ironically, my running times have never been better — if you’re looking at how fast I can go for short sprints.
One of my favorite bits of Peloton wisdom I’ve heard lately is from Becs Gentry, a notoriously difficult running instructor. I recently did one of her runs that involved keeping your heart rate down while running steep hills. As she said, “This is about learning to be calm while you’re working hard.” To me, that’s what we gain with age, the ability to do hard things more easily.
