How marriage is like fitness and fitness like marriage.

Our wedding that was in 3 weeks time, has now been cancelled. Due to you know what, we’ve had to pivot.

I’m sad. Really sad. It feels like a deep loss.

But there’s 2 things:

1. No matter what chaos is going on I have complete control over my internal environment. I’m feeling that loss but I’m also choosing acceptance. The feeling of loss will become less. That acceptance is giving me freedom. They coexist.

2. A wedding is not a marriage. Marriage—love— is the essence of a wedding.

This is the same as your fitness.

1. No matter what’s going on externally, you have more power than you think: to be okay with pivoting, to choose acceptance over overwhelm, to be curious with how things might look different.

2. The essence of your fitness is self respect—love— whether you’re aware of that or not.

My brilliant friend wrote to me: ‘A wedding is firmly marked in space and time. It is specific and neatly boxed up with the boundaries of conventions. To have a wedding we need a marriage. But a marriage stands just fine without a wedding. It is fluid, unwritten and absolutely limitless.’

There would not be outcome goals of strength, fitness, health without your tenacity to want to be 1% better because you give a damn about yourself. So how can you apply those same values now, in this circumstance, with things feeling like they’ve turned upside down?

The essence behind why you do what you do is the same.

Pivot. Then pivot again when it’s time. You’re only becoming a more gritty human.

I’m pivoting too. But the essence of our wedding is us and whatever things look like on the outside, the essence of us doesn’t change.

Just like your fitness. The shell looks different right now, but get deeper with it, allow yourself to open up to what fitness truly means to you or could mean to you.

Fitness can also be fixed in space and time with outcome goals (like strength and aesthetics) and physical spaces. It can also be specific and neatly boxed up with the boundaries of conventions. But you can choose your fitness to stand just fine without the environment you’re used to.

Your fitness, like a marriage, is fluid, unwritten and absolutely limitless.

I've created The Bold Collective: outside of the gym edition to help you still have intention and purpose to your training in this unsettling time. To find a new rhythm in this time, a new normal go here to get on the waitlist for The Bold Collective: outside of the gym edition.