SeanFromCanada's Blog

Originally posted on 09.25.13

“Fitness is our life — our life”.

– Sergeant John Prior

As we walked the halls and toured the unit’s history, we weren’t alone. On each side of us, soldiers made their way up and down the aisles flipping tires, doing deep squats with huge barbells and lunging their way slowly end to end. John explained that between 8 am and 10 am, the soldiers work out. The first hour is usually an organized, group activity and then they can branch off and do their own exercises. Everyday.

We passed three weight / work out rooms on our brief tour and all were packed with some of the fittest human beings I’ve ever seen. Keep in mind, as a (previously) internationally ranked badminton player, I’m not easily impressed by someone who can lift a weight or do some burpies… I’ve been there, done that. But let me be clear, these guys were extremely fit. Not in the muscle bound, ballooned up weight junkie kind of way. They were cut from stone, well-proportioned to combine strength with agility, speed with endurance. They worked on things like calve strength (not a common ‘go to exercise’ if picking up chicks is your sole goal) and muscle endurance (vs. creating large biceps for show). They were specimens in fitness.

As we enquired more about their workout routines, we came to learn that this group commonly enters marathons, triathlons and outdoor endurance races…just for the exercise! John had recently broken his hand during a 50KM outdoor adventure race he had entered a week after the Edmonton half marathon…what’d you do this summer?

As I watched the guys work out, I wondered about stretching. I’m now 42, stretching has become a necessity before any activity. One of the soldiers smirked and said, ‘there’s not a lot of stretching in the army’. Before the sentence was even finished, my boys launched into a hilarious exaggeration, describing the Taliban storming down the mountain with our troops calling a ‘time out’ to don their Lululemons and stretch out their hammies before the ensuing battle. Ridiculous of course…I guess you gotta be ready to go, when it’s time to go. This would be a problem for me…

I’ll tell you about our tower jump, the obstacle course, the march and the many other physical activities we endured through the day in later posts, but suffice it to say, being a paratrooper means you live in an extremely physical world. (By contrast, not once have I blown a muscle or broken a bone while designing SharePoint solutions).

By the end of our day, we were all physically exhausted, bleeding and sore as hell. I can see that being incredibly fit, strong and having super-human endurance is the price of admission into this elite group…their lives depend on it.