Are we "all" gonna make it?
“We’re all gonna make it” is a common refrain within our corner of the Internet. What it means to “make it” varies from being a father, to becoming wealthy, to achieving a legendary physique or even simply losing one’s virginity.
I am fond of the expression in my own content, particularly as it pertains to physicality and training. In this context, to “make it,” being to achieve the physique and performance that we aspire to. However, this simple line became more philosophical when the question was put to me, who is “all?” Every person that sees my content? Every person trying? Perhaps it’s a bit jaded to assert many will not achieve their ideals, but I found it a compelling and useful question to chew on.
Are we all gonna make it? Is it useful to approach our communities online and IRL as though we all could? How do we deter weekend warriors or guys that would bring bad energy into the environment?
As readers of my content, I feel safe assuming that the majority of you are quite attentive to your own fitness. Alas, as I do not belong to the glorious home gym master race and have a subscription to a fitness center, I am annually witness to the New Years resolutioners, or simply “tourists.”
Every year, from January 1st to about St. Patrick’s Day (Mar.17th,) a new crop of people of all ages and conditions flood local gyms, using subscriptions bought over the holiday season either by themselves, or as a pointed gift from family.
Around the first thaw, most of them will have already stopped showing up, and it becomes markedly easier to find an open squat rack. It is these that my helpful critic was pointing to as the flaw of “we are all gonna make it.” That it is either naïve or misleading to advocate for and celebrate a lifestyle of commitment and endurance as though anyone could, since most simply will not. However, from my own experience, out of the yearly tourists there are always a handful that remain. In all different conditions, likely with different goals and motivations, but they put the work in until they are regulars. The wheat remains while the chaff falls away.
Is that not our ideals in practice? What I am looking for in others I train with, whose work I read or follow, who I challenge and who challenge me, it’s not how much heavier they can lift than me, or how they look. It’s the doggedness, the steadfastness. The most impressive fitness journeys I have seen begin from hopeless, ruined bodies and people who are (literally) sick to death of abusing themselves. Much like how Hercules has to achieve Godhood after the darkest act possible (kinslaying,) these journeys begin at depths I cannot imagine, and mile-for-mile humble my own achievements.
We absolutely must begin from a place of “we’re all gonna make it,” because we do not yet know the heart of the young men and women who enter our circles looking to improve. That said, it is good and right of us to really push each other and to expect results within those circles. Like the resolutioners, they have to demonstrate they are above not only the other fresh meat they came in with, but especially above the person they were when they arrived. If they do not, in the words of Drill Sargent Zim from Starship Troopers, “Anytime you think I'm being too rough, anytime you think I'm being too tough, anytime you miss-your-mommy, QUIT! You sign your 1240-A, you get your gear, and you take a stroll down washout lane.”
Those who stick with it, who carry on the projects and the training and the diet and the difficulty, that’s us. That’s who we are, and we are all gonna make it, bros.