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A Bodybuilder Is Born:  Generations

Episode 17: Get out of the middle of the road!

By Ron Harris

School had just let out for the summer. This meant that my 14-year-old daughter would be a rare sight until after Labor Day. Sharing the common adolescent belief that her parents are not only un-cool, oppressive, and an embarrassment to be avoided, Marisa would manage to become as much of a fixture at her friends’ houses as possible without actually being furniture. During one stretch last summer, she was at one particular chum’s abode so often that I contemplated having her mail forwarded there. My eight-year-old son was a different story. He not only wanted to be around me, he wanted me to take him somewhere fun and exciting every day. “Daddy, what are we doing today?” was his echoing refrain. I tried to keep him occupied while still attempting to get my writing work done, but nothing short of a day at the beach or an amusement park like Six Flags constituted ‘fun.’ In fact, I was a little miffed at Six Flags for their onslaught of recent TV commercials rating the ‘fun level’ of everyday life (which never seemed to earn more than one flag on this scale) to the thrills and good times of plummeting down 300-foot dips and being spun upside down at 90 miles an hour on a roller coaster. In case you were wondering, the adrenaline-stimulating, not to mention gut-churning and bladder-loosening attractions of Six Flags, earned the following review from a maniacal Japanese guy screaming, “Six Flags! More flags, more fun!”

Of course, this advertising campaign was still a big improvement over the “Mr. 6″ commercials from a few years ago. I suppose the character was meant to embody the wacky and carefree spirit of the place. Mr. 6 was a young man with theatrical makeup to make him appear to be in his 70’s or 80’s, with an ill-fitting fat suit, a bowtie, and these big creepy cartoon-like glasses. Seen hip-hop dancing with wild abandon to the catchy dance hit “The Venga Bus is Coming,” I suspect he frightened away far more potential customers than his shenanigans attracted. I know I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near that spastically dancing goon.

My training clients Jared and Jeff were off on a very early summer vacation, having literally just begun heading east for their beachfront house on Cape Cod. I had never been there, but brief descriptions had given me a good idea of the place - not quite a compound, but more than you could simply call a ‘beach house.’ I wouldn’t see them for two weeks or so.

That was fine, because I had a lot of work to do. I was only three weeks away from my first guest posing appearance. Some of you may be unfamiliar with that term. A guest poser is someone who goes to a bodybuilding contest to perform, even though he or she is not competing in it. Your photo typically appears on the posters and flyers, which is meant to get more people to come watch the show. The guest poser is supposed to be at a higher level than the competitors, which is why most of them are professionals and appear at amateur events. If you’re really lucky, like the folks that attend the NPC New England Championships here in Boston
every year, you get to see Mr. Olympia Jay Cutler flex his monstrous 300-pound physique for your entertainment. If you happened to be going to this other contest in mid-July, you got to see me. I am not a pro, unless the pro is short for procrastinator. My only claim to fame is that I won this same show last summer, and I also happen to write a lot of training articles about the pros. I find that the more of these I do over the years, the more some people get confused and mistakenly think I’m a pro bodybuilder myself. I don’t pretend for a minute to resemble the magnificent beasts that are today’s pro bodybuilders. But, being the reigning champ of the show, being a decent poser, and being willing to do it for the right price (the promoter’s undying gratitude and the roar of the crowd), I was all set to get up on stage again in less than a month.

One of the reasons I immediately agreed to take the gig was that it would more or less force me to get in shape for the summer. If you are going to be in shape on the East Coast of the USA, summer would definitely be the best time. For a brief couple of months, everybody wears shorts and tank tops. And all of you that work hard on your bodies know how much a little appreciation helps keep us motivated over the cold, dark months that are never too far away. We all look better leaned out and with a tan. That’s when I get a lot of people asking me, “Are you a bodybuilder? Do you compete? Are you getting ready for a contest?” In the winter, the questions are usually more like, “Are you one of those slightly slimmer Sumo wrestlers?” and my favorite, “Hey pal, can you move it along, other people are trying to get all we can eat at this buffet too, you know.”

There was only one problem with this whole plan to get in shape to guest pose. I was not going to be competing, therefore I had nobody to worry about beating. That took a lot of pressure off me, which in this case was a bad thing. All that was really at stake was my pride, which would take a big hit if I showed up out of shape and smooth as a baby’s ass. And thanks to the World Wide Web, the people in the audience would not be the only ones to bear witness to my lack of dieting discipline. Oh no, pics and comments would be uploaded in a flash, and my nickname throughout the Western World would be ‘Fat-Ass Harris.’ The news of me looking like crap would be more of a topic of conversation in my industry than the Presidential election.

The show was in mid-July, and I had been putting off going on a really strict diet for far too long. Sure, I would eat a couple super-clean meals every day along with a couple shakes that were blends of Hi-Protein^TM and Optimized Whey^TM, but I was also not passing up the occasional two or seven slices of pizza, big bowl of ice cream, or bucket-sized bowls of sugary kids’ cereals like Honeycombs, Golden Grahams, or Honey Nut Cheerios. Because I was eating clean sometimes and putting down pure junk at others, I was on neither side of the road - more like the middle. I don’t know how many of you remember “The Karate Kid,” but Mr. Miyagi expressed the idea of doing something half-assed in a similar manner. “Walk on left side, okay. Walk on right side, okay. Walk in middle -”And with this, he clapped his hands together and made the universal sound effect of a car smashing into a hapless pedestrian and turning said pedestrian into a meat pancake. At about six weeks out from the contest, I looked in the mirror and realized I was in the middle of the road and had to move my ass away from there before I too got run over - if not by a Mack truck, then by the online jeers and mockery that would follow me appearing out of shape as sure as night follows day.

That’s the thing with getting ripped. Unless you are one of the few metabolically blessed types that can see a deep six-pack on their midsection no matter how much junk you eat, it takes a totally strict diet followed for a substantial amount of time to see significant loss in bodyfat. By giving in so often to cravings, I had been taking the proverbial two steps forward, one step back. Actually, since I had not been getting any leaner, it was probably more like two steps forward and two steps back.

You also have to do your fair share of cardio, and it can’t be the wimpy Valium-trance pace you see most people doing. I had never been guilty of that, and I had never been afraid to work hard on my cardio. With seven Liver Aminos^TM at each meal, I didn’t need to worry about iron deficiency, or ‘sports anemia.’

So now, at the eleventh hour, I finally had my shit together and was seeing better definition almost every day. But it only happened once I made a full commitment to stay on a contest-type diet. If you want to get really lean, that’s simply the only way to make it happen. The junk has to go, cold turkey. You can’t be a recovering alcoholic and still drink on weekends, and you can’t be on a contest diet to get ripped and be eating a ton of sugar and saturated fat once or twice a day. You’re either sober or you aren’t, and you’re either on a diet or you’re not. It took me almost humiliating myself looking flabby on stage to come to terms with that.

Now I just had some calculations to do before I decided where to take my son on our next family outing. Would it be cheaper to pay for gas for the 200-mile round trip to the nearest Six Flags, or to fly from Boston to Orlando to experience Disney World? For now, Six Flags won out, but as prices for fuel continued to climb, it might not for much longer. Six Flags, more fun? I worry that by the end of summer we might be lamenting, “Six bucks a gallon for gas? No fun!”

Community pick:  bodybuilding products, bodybuilding supplements, program and plans
Parrillo Performance
p.  (800) 344-3404