Grinding It Out

At one point today, I looked out my window to see my neighbor doing his training. His training is short, but it's awfully hard. He was out there with his wife and their dog. The story is a bit more complex than I'm letting on.

My neighbor has emphysema. He also had a bout with cancer last year, and the juggling of treatments caused a heart attack. The result was a leg that barely worked and deconditioning so severe that walking down a short flight of stairs would exhaust him several months ago.

He wears a pulse oximeter to tell him if his disabled lungs are getting enough oxygen to his body. He was pushing his walker a short distance and resting, then repeating. It was interval work, but at a pace that most of us would think ludicrous. He was trained as an engineer and has always regarded himself as an experimental subject. He just asks the question of how he can train his body to do more. Thus far, he's astounded his doctors with regularity. They'd expected him to be dead from the emphysema about a decade ago. He keeps grinding it out, pushing himself to his limits (and these days, that means just a couple of hundred yards walking) to raise those limits in the future.

Compared to most of us, the distances are much shorter, the speed much slower, but this man trains hard. I respect that.