Adventure calls your name

Make fitness an escape to find consistency

Answer the Call

At the heart of all the great stories and myths in human culture, no matter the time period or location, is the hero’s journey. The one who answers the call to adventure, breaks free from the tribe, embarks on a legendary journey of discovery, and then returns to the group with special new knowledge obtained only through honorable struggle and sacrifice.

This motif is such a powerful frame because it not only describes the nature of human adventure colonizing the globe as the top animal on planet earth, it’s a remarkable psychological and physiological understanding of exercise and sport.

Each muscle goes on a ‘hero’s journey’ of sorts during exercise, being stretched and pushed beyond breaking, repairing itself in recovery, and growing through the struggle of progressive overload (slowly taking on more and more difficulty).

When you start a new habit, it’s the same process as well, slowly extending yourself in a new direction, giving up something that used to be valuable but isn’t serving you, and becoming a better version of yourself by giving it up.

With the hero’s journey, there is a consilience of different streams of truth converging on one conclusions. When a number of independent inquiries all line up to give the same answer, it’s a sign of deep truth.

So how can you make the deep truth of the ‘hero’s journey’ work for you in your workouts and fitness?

3 steps to start living the Hero’s Journey in your fitness

1. Answer the Call to Adventure

The fitness industry is big on marketing hype but small in terms of substance. They make gimmicks look like adventure and lure people into highly lit, music pumping, high energy environments, that are sterile, sanitized, and designed for maximum comfort.

The hero doesn’t go to a place of comfort as the main destination of the adventure and neither should you. Too many people view the gym as their only option for physical health and then get tricked into thinking driving 3-4 times a week to a climate controlled adult themed play world is the adventure. WRONG.

The call to adventure is the little voice inside of you that cries out for something big, to go after a dream despite everyone warning you not to, and to drive towards it with all of your heart. To answer it you need to be exploring outside your comfort zone, for most of us that means getting up and outside.

It can start small, for example one of my 1-1 clients is rediscovering his own call to adventure by leaning into what we’re calling ‘conveyance’ sports. Things like biking, kayaking, snowshoeing, cross country-skiing, etc. He doesn’t enjoy going ‘all out’ at the gym but enjoys moving throughout the country side or a different part of the city in a brisk fashion. Now he’s out exploring his local rail trail on his bike a few times a week as his way of reclaiming his own physical consistency.

That freedom to explore opens up the opportunity for adventure, it’s a way to eagerly await the call, be able to hear it, and then take advantage to GO.

2.Seek and Demand Beauty

The call to adventure relates to a deep passion inside yourself. It’s a spiritual expression of your potential and the correct aim to realize it in your life. Find that reflected in the world through immersion in beauty.

“The contemplation of beauty causes the soul to grow wings” Plato

Since the hero’s journey is unique to you, what stands out as adventure and thus as beautiful is also dependent on your style.

Beauty is crucial to living the hero’s journey because of the inspiration that comes from surrounding oneself with beautiful things. Think of the ‘smallness’ you feel when looking out from a magnificent viewpoint high above the ground and the appreciation for the present moment that washes over you.

This revelry for the beautiful intensifies your passion and desire. It’s like gasoline on your internal fire. It’s how you reach beyond into the divine, or unknowable.

“Beauty is the gift of God” - Aristotle

One important element of the hero’s journey is faith, what allows the hero to cross the initial threshold into the unknown.

There’s mystery, uncertainty, fear, hesitation, skepticism, and more that hold most back from taking those first few steps along the hero’s path. Rather than being a frivolous add on to the journey, beauty is something that drives you forward in the darkest times.

Your adventure should take you to beautiful places that make you experience beautiful emotions, creating beautiful experiences and forging beautiful memories onto your heart. Think about exercising in nature, going for trail runs, building a home gym in your backyard, playing sports with the kids in the twilight. The Ancient Greeks built all their most impressive athletic stadiums in places of awe inspiring natural beauty for good reason. Make physical activity a ritual in beautifying your life.

This will naturally lead to more ambition, more adventure, more striving, more willingness to suffer, more eagerness to sacrifice, in order to feel the transcendence of becoming surrounded by beauty.

3.Escape to isolation

The hero’s journey isn’t a group adventure. It’s a solitary journey.

In order to find the hero inside yourself through exercise and physical activity, you need to be confident isolating yourself from distraction and stimulation. This allows you to hone in on the inner signal you’re using to aim the adventure in the first place.

People often say “exercise is my therapy” but what I believe they really mean is “exercise is my form of meditation.” A chance to zone out of the mundane external obligations and connect with the inner narrative. Once isolated from the normal things that bombard your mind, you can focus on probing deeper within yourself.

In order to ‘know thyself’ there must be a serious dialogue with yourself. You can only achieve that in moments of silence. Many of us find a rhythmic pattern of inner dialogue through familiar motion patterns, or exercise. Think of the rhythmic breathing of a runner taking down miles step by step, using that automatic pattern of breath and step to engage in a conversation with themselves.

Take out the headphones. Find peace in the silence. Use your effort and struggle to open the door into self knowledge and understanding. Listen to what you hear. Act on it. But recognize without the isolation, you aren’t able to correctly identify the signal.

Now it’s YOUR TURN

Philosophy that can’t be applied isn’t worth the time to take to consider it, so here’s some practical ways I know you can apply to live out these steps. As always, be creative and apply in your own way and style. The most important thing is to get the aim right and then use your imagination and resiliency to make it real.

Step 1: Answer the Call

Take a few minutes and a blank sheet of paper. Close your eyes. Ask yourself the following questions:

• What have I held myself back from accomplishing that I know I should go after for physical health?

• If I had no limitations, what would my heart tell me to do?

Listen to what you hear and write it down, don’t worry about anything else other than making what’s implicit explicit.

Now take a look at the activity, the goal, the desire. That’s your north star.

That’s your aim. That’s your adventure.

Step 2: Seek and Demand Beauty

Now that you’ve got your aim, it’s time to bring your style and personality to the process. Make every element of the adventure radiate with beauty.

• Wear clothes that inspire you.

• Listen to music that energizes you.

• Go to places that make you appreciate beauty (inside or outside).

Think of gaining skill and talent in whatever exercise or activity you’re training in as an artistic journey. Just like a painter or musician improves their skills in order to make more beautiful art, so to does an athlete when they aim at a physical goal connected to their heart.

Another fun thing to keep in mind, many creatives are the heroes who go searching with their curiosity and imagination to discover new ideas and forms of beauty to share with the world.

You can do that same with your body, you just have to demand that dedication from yourself and refuse to sacrifice it’s importance.

Step 3: Escape to Isolation

Think of isolation more as a frame of mind than a physical necessity.

Yes, it would be great if you could physically get into a space without any other people, but for some that’s not logistically possible all the time.

The best thing to do is find that place of solitude and get after it with your intention. It’s why I love running technical trails, I rarely see another person for hours.

If you don’t have the option of escaping into nature for a workout, here’s some tips on finding isolation in crowded place.

• Find the dead space at the gym, go during the less busy hours

• Use noise cancelling headphones but don’t play distracting music. Instead think of instrumental style music that blocks out the outside noise but not the internal signal.

• If you go to group classes or communal workouts like a run club, try to go alone one time a week to find this space for yourself.

Takeaways

Ultimately, fitness itself is a type of hero’s journey of physical improvement. But the consilience of the hero’s journey in so many areas of life means we shouldn’t be content with just this way to realize it through exercise.

The more we double down on deep truths the more value we obtain from interacting honestly with them. This is more of a way to enhance and deepen physical exercise, to bring its best value into your life.

So if you’re struggling to get back to the gym or feel like you’re plateauing with your fitness, this heroic endeavor is a way to bring your heart into the process. Ultimately, this is what drives your hero’s journey towards your greatest potential.

Now you have a way to both understand and actualize it profoundly in your life.

I wish you nothing but the best on your heroic journey, and if you’re looking for a mentor to guide you (see the image at the top), send me a message using the button below and let’s work together to make you realize the hero living inside you.