The Lab Rat Starts Learning

The first walks proved that I could start.

The next lesson was that starting was the gentle bit.

By the beginning of February 2012, the new routine had enough shape to be dangerous. I was getting up early, walking Marble, drinking more water, logging food, choosing stairs, and watching the small numbers begin to move. It was still a fragile little thing, but it had survived the first week. For once, the idea had not dissolved back into normal life the moment it became inconvenient.

Then Britt sent me into a room full of exercise stations, music, sweat, and evidence.

A Room Full Of Evidence

My first DJ Clubfit session was at Walkabout Wellness in Malaga, which meant driving about forty kilometres for the privilege of discovering exactly how far I had let myself go. There was a DJ playing music, a circuit of stations, and a whiteboard where the numbers were going to be written down next to my name. Exercise bike. Rowing machine. Push-ups, or in my case half push-ups. Step-ups. Bicep curls. Tricep curls. Boxing. Ab crunches. Stretching.

One minute at a time.

That was the whole format. Do what you can, recover as needed, move to the next station, and let the results exist in public.

It could have been awful. There are gyms and fitness spaces where a fat bloke in his forties can feel as though he has walked into someone else’s country without a passport. This was not that. The atmosphere was good. People seemed to be having fun. There was no sense of the typical gym poseur routine I had half expected and fully dreaded. The music helped too. I have always loved music, and a beat can make effort feel slightly less like punishment and slightly more like an oddly sweaty night out.

Still, the session told the truth.

My flexibility was terrible. Thigh muscles cramped and burned after a few seconds. My back and legs carried years of desk work, armchairs, not moving enough, and pretending that future-me could sort it out later. The circuit dragged my physical shortcomings into the open with very little ceremony.

The surprising thing was that I enjoyed it.

Not because I was good at it. I very clearly was not. I enjoyed it because it gave me something I could work with. Before that night, “unfit” had been a foggy accusation. After that night, it had edges. It had stations. It had counts. It had a whiteboard baseline. I could be embarrassed by those numbers, or I could treat them as the first page of a training file.

The body had its own view of the evening. Once I had cooled down, got my breath back, and poured enough water into myself, I was buzzing. That buzz lasted for the drive home, then collapsed neatly into sleep. The next morning I was sore, but not destroyed. I got up around 4am, took Marble out, and immediately found that the usual walk had become a little slower.

That was interesting.

Learning To Observe

The dog walk was no longer just a dog walk. It had become a personal barometer. A hard session the night before showed up in the legs the next morning. A good sleep showed up. A poor food choice showed up. Extra water showed up. The same ordinary loop could tell me whether the body was absorbing the work or complaining about it.

That was the beginning of me learning to observe myself without turning every observation into drama.

The next afternoon another old pattern surfaced. After the DJ Clubfit session, I started sneezing. I felt warm and sweaty. My throat was dry and irritable. Add in the muscle and joint aches from the circuit and it looked very much like the start of one of my familiar collapses into a “cold”.

This mattered more than it sounds.

For years I had often felt ill after heavy work, a big night, an all-nighter, or anything that pushed my system beyond its usual limits. I would get the aches, the sneezing, the wiped-out feeling, and then I would go looking for a name. Glandular fever. Chronic fatigue. Thyroid problems. Whatever Dr Google could throw at the situation. The symptoms were real, which made the excuse feel real too. If I was ill, I had a way out.

This time, because I was already watching more closely, I saw the pattern as it happened.

It was not flu. It was not even man flu, which is obviously the most serious medical category known to domestic life. It was my body reacting to stress, and maybe my mind trying to herd me back towards the old sedentary normal. I had pushed a little harder than usual, and the system had started waving familiar flags.

The difference was that I did not obey them.

I did not ignore pain in some reckless, heroic way. I simply stopped treating every uncomfortable signal as proof that I had to quit. I recognised it, watched it, adjusted around it, and carried on. That little shift blocked one of the old exits. The “I must be getting sick” door had always been conveniently open. Suddenly it was not.

That is where the lab-rat part of the story becomes more than a joke.

The Lab Rat Frame

Back at the very start of no more mr fat guy, I had described my role in Britt’s bigger thinking as being something like a lab rat. There was humour in that, but it also turned out to be a useful frame. I was trying to lose weight while testing a system on myself, in public, with all the messy details left in. Food. Mood. Sleep. Water. Steps. Training. Excuses. Family life. Work days. The lot.

If the first week had been about taking small actions, this next phase was about feedback.

That meant joining Jetts.

Before Dawn At Jetts

I signed up at the Canning Vale gym because it was open twenty-four hours a day. It was not the closest option, but the point was not convenience in the old sense. The point was to remove one more reason not to train. If I had to wait until six in the evening, the day would have too many chances to swallow the plan. With a 24/7 gym, I could get up early, train, walk Marble, get the bus, and arrive at work already having done the thing.

Of course, the first Jetts visit was a comic anti-climax. I had built it up in my head as the moment the training would go up a level, and it turned out to be a guided tour, a safety briefing, forms, and fees. Useful, necessary, and not remotely the mighty gym session I had imagined.

The next morning, though, it began properly.

I woke just before 4am and headed out, leaving Marble with what I recorded as a sad look on her face. She got a shorter walk when I came back, so peace was restored, but that morning was one of the first times the new routine had to make room for competing loyalties. Gym first. Dog next. Work after that. It was all possible, but only if the day had structure.

The session itself was basic and brutal in exactly the right way.

Five minutes on the bike to warm up. Four sets of 500 metres on the rowing machine, with leg stretches in between. Fitball squats. Knee push-ups. Nothing there would frighten an athlete, but I was not an athlete. I was a bloke learning how to move without breaking himself.

The rowing machine was the revelation and the humiliation.

I did the first 500 metres in 2 minutes 30 seconds. The second was also 2 minutes 30. The next two slipped to 2 minutes 40 each. I was out of puff, struggling to keep my knees in, and discovering that a rowing machine is wonderfully honest about the state of your lungs, legs, core, back, timing, rhythm, and ego.

But there it was: 2 kilometres rowed before breakfast.

Pretty damn fantastic, as far as I was concerned.

The next few days turned that into a pattern. Rowing times. Water intake. Stairs. Walking from the train station to the office. A short walk with Marble. A resting pulse around 70. By Friday I had rowed 6 kilometres in three days. My technique was terrible. My hips ached. My legs felt like jelly. My feet slipped out of the straps during one of the rows. None of that cancelled the work.

Numbers That Could Teach Me

The numbers changed the emotional texture of training.

Without numbers, a gym session could be judged by mood alone, and mood is a slippery little thing. If I felt clumsy, the session was bad. If I felt tired, the session was bad. If I did not perform like the imaginary future version of myself, the session was bad. But a training log made the session more complicated and more useful. Bad technique could sit beside better effort. Slower times could sit beside less stopping. Soreness could sit beside improved recovery. A tired morning could still contain a measurable win.

I needed that.

I had spent too many years thinking in all-or-nothing blocks. Fit or unfit. On track or off track. Healthy or hopeless. Success or failure. The training started to teach me smaller categories. Tired but improving. Sore but recovering. Slow but present. Hungry because the body was actually doing more. A bit clumsy, yes, but learning.

Britt’s feedback kept pushing me away from stupidity disguised as determination. I was not supposed to starve myself into progress. I was not supposed to run before my body was ready. I was not supposed to turn every session into a punishment ritual. The job was to build the engine, strengthen the frame, and pay attention.

Paying attention changed water, too.

Three weeks earlier I had mostly treated water as something that needed cordial, bottling, or an apology. Now I was drinking between two and a half and three and a half litres a day, sometimes more when the day was hot or active. It was not a magic potion. It was more practical than that. I felt different when I was properly hydrated. The early starts were easier. The training sat in my body differently. Energy did not depend quite so much on caffeine, sugar, and hope.

Sleep changed in the same unglamorous way.

I had been a night owl for years. Two, three, four in the morning had often been bedtime rather than waking time. Now I was trying to get most of the training done early, arrive at work earlier, leave earlier, and still have something left for the family. The change was drastic enough that I called it a lifestyle reboot, which sounds grand, but in practice meant putting myself to bed like a responsible adult and getting up while the house was still quiet.

Fitness gave me something I had not expected: time.

Same Route, Different Body

By 12 February, the day before the official Walkabout Wellness Weightloss Challenge began, I had three weeks of pre-season under my belt, which, as I wrote at the time, was still under my beer gut. I weighed in at 139.1 kg, down 3.5 kg from the original 142.6. That number mattered, but it was not the whole result.

The real result was that the system was starting to respond.

There was a simple cycling comparison that made it obvious. Just before Christmas, I had ridden a route of about 6.5 kilometres and suffered through it. The outward trip took around an hour, with several stops, heavy breathing, and drained legs. The return was just as bad, and the following week was full of aches.

In February I rode the same route again. About forty-five minutes out. Two brief stops for water. Breathing back to normal within about thirty seconds of arriving. The return trip was tougher because it was dark and there was a flat tyre near the end, but even then the difference was enormous. I got home hot and sweaty, recovered quickly, and the next morning the usual walk was only lightly affected. By the following day, the walk was a personal best.

That was the kind of proof I could understand.

Not a motivational slogan. Not a before-and-after fantasy. A same-route comparison between December-me and February-me. Same body, but already different enough to notice.

Then came the 12 February benchmark: a 500 metre warm-up row, a 1 kilometre run/walk, and a 1 kilometre row. Afterwards I wrote on Facebook that there might be a delay in the stats because I might need a snooze before writing anything else up. The next three-week program had rowing, weight machines, push-ups, squats, giving things up, taking new things on, and setting a weekly goal.

It had gone up several notches.

Good.

That is easy to say now, but the important thing is that I wanted it to. Something in me had begun to trust the discomfort because it was no longer shapeless. I had a trainer. I had a blog. I had Facebook witnesses. I had numbers. I had a dog still expecting her walk. I had a gym I could get into before dawn. I had enough proof to keep going and enough ignorance to keep learning.

Reading A Day

Looking forward from here, the later story can seem to be about bigger and bigger distances: longer rows, first fun runs, half marathons, marathons, ultras, and eventually Hearts Across Australia. But one of the deep changes was happening much earlier and much quieter.

I was learning how to read a day.

How did I sleep? What did I eat? How much water did I drink? What did the legs say on the morning walk? Did the rowing time drop because I was lazy, tired, under-fuelled, sore, or just using terrible technique? Was that cough a warning sign, or was it the old escape hatch creaking open again? Could I recover faster than last time? Could I do the same route better than December? Could I put the numbers down honestly and let them teach me?

Years later, when HAA depended on repeating long days and making constant little adjustments, this habit would matter more than any dramatic speech. You do not get through a huge physical project by pretending the body is silent. You get through it by listening carefully enough to know when to push, when to back off, when to drink, when to eat, when to change socks, when to shut up and keep moving, and when the discomfort is simply the work doing its work.

In February 2012, I was nowhere near that level of understanding.

I was still the bloke who had to adjust the rower because the water level was too much. Still the bloke doing knee push-ups. Still the bloke whose dog looked betrayed when he went to the gym without her. Still the bloke who could be absurdly proud of rowing 2 kilometres before breakfast.

And rightly so.

Because the lab rat was learning.