The Elevator Game

Some friends came over for dinner last week.

We met in grad school more than a decade ago. Lost touch for a stretch, moved to different cities, lived different lives, and then found our way back to each other years later. That's its own kind of friendship.

Their daughter is five.

She kept asking her dad to pick her up and put her down, over and over. One of them called it ‘The Elevator Game,’ I think. He played it a lot, and his arms weren't giving out.

My son was on my forearm. Twelve pounds, a koala.

I thought: in five years, I want to be able to play the elevator game too.

I've been thinking about some version of this for months, since before my son was born. Becoming a dad in your late thirties changes what you think about first when you think about your body.

I grew up feeling like an athlete. Competitive soccer until university. At university, I made most of my best friends through sports and the gym. When I started working, I'd run through cities I was visiting just to see them. Snowboarding trips, surf, hikes in places I'd never go otherwise. Training was woven into life, not squeezed around it.

That changes. Workouts move from the center of the day to the edges. Life gets bigger, the slots for it get smaller, and each chapter gets more individual.

Drift accelerates when you're doing it alone. Or at least for me, that’s the case.

Last year, a foot injury took most of the year to come back from. I’m still not back. Months where the body came last. Months where I could feel myself getting further from the version of me I used to be.

Once I was off bed rest, I tried to keep going. But I kept doing it the old way.

I went to my commercial gym on crutches. Two or three times. Then again, with a surgical boot, pedaling one of their stationary bikes with the boot. I have a picture on my phone. It was ridiculous, and it didn't work.

The gym itself was a big one, crowded, with stairs running through it. I hopped around, sweating through simple things, while people watched with the kind of concern that isn't helping. The round trip took longer than anything I got done inside, and I'd come home more defeated than when I left.

I kept telling myself that pushing through was discipline. But it was a mismatch. The environment didn't match what I could do, and grinding through it made me feel worse, not better.

Sometimes what you try doesn't work. That's a signal to rethink, not a reason to quit.

I stopped trying that version. Canceled the gym. Put a Tonal on the wall in a windowless room off the side of the garage. A Zwift bike in the corner. No commute, no program to design, no impact on my foot, no one in the mirror I was trying to prove something to. Show up, and the equipment tells me what to do.

From the inside, it felt less like quitting and more like gambling on something that might match the life I actually have now. I'd never had a home setup before, and I didn't know if I'd use it.

In the background, I've been reading Peter Attia’s Outlive lately, and part of what he keeps coming back to is that some of this drift is just happening to you. Muscle loss starts quietly as early as your thirties. By your fifties, you're losing roughly one to two percent a year, and strength goes even faster than mass. Your body is quietly moving without you.

The stakes aren't aesthetic. Muscle is the tissue that manages your blood sugar, anchors your joints, carries your bone density, and decides whether a bad fall at seventy becomes the end of your independence or just a bad week.

There's grace in knowing some of this is just biology, and also an imperative in knowing it won't correct itself. Most of aging happens to you, but this is one thing you actually get to push back on.

For a long time, I couldn't motivate myself to hit a weight goal. The number always felt thin compared to everything else going on. I'd set it, miss it, and the missing felt worse than the not-trying.

What's working is a different kind of why.

I don't care that much whether I can bench a specific number. I care whether I can pick my son up when he's five. Whether I can run around with him when he's ten. Whether I can still show up when he's thirty.

External purpose moves me when internal goals don't these days.

The voice that beats you up when the bench feels heavier than it used to is the same voice that used to cheer when you showed up. You don't need a new voice, you need the old one back.

And if you're in a chapter where the body is in service to something bigger, a newborn, a busy stretch, a new venture, a recovery, a family chapter, or an adventure, this isn't failure, and it's not forever. It's a pause, not a verdict, and you can commit to coming back when you can. Most of the time, though, it's better to just pick a smaller move than none at all.

I started in January, and my home setup tracks a strength score. It's moved from 600 to 759 in about thirteen weeks. I don't know exactly how the algorithm works, but the line is moving, I feel stronger than I did, which is the point, and I have a long way to go.

Match what you're doing to the life you're in. Then show up consistently.

See you next Sunday,
Eric

P.S. There's an element of community I miss, and I haven't figured out how to address it right now. If you've solved it, let me know, but I'm sort of accepting it's not the season. I'll bring it back when I can.