A Bodybuilder is Born: Generations

Wah, wah, wah!

What’s that sound? No, it’s not Snooki from Jersey Shore – it’s something I call the wambulance. Whenever someone around me starts whining and bitching about something trivial, and it almost always is, I announce that someone needs to call the wambulance.

Human nature dictates that we all easily fall into patterns of complaining, feeling sorry for ourselves, and making excuses.

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Ron Harris – A Bodybuilder is Born

It was the day after my forty-first birthday, which had been remarkably unremarkable. Hitting forty last year was a big deal and had marked a milestone in my life. Luckily, I had gone through my mid-life crisis years before, the way some women start menopause early, so I wasn’t dealing with any major angst-ridden search for the meaning of my existence or questioning choices in my mate or career. And I already had a sports car and a wife who was nearly my age but looked much younger, so my birthday was really just another day. Though I did stop to ponder that in some Third World countries, forty-one was probably the average life expectancy. If you made it that far in those rough places, you were probably a great-grandfather too by that  advanced age.

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There is no “off-season”

I was in high spirits as summer vacation was in its final days and my kids would soon be back in school. Having put my son in day camp for most of the summer had saved me from hearing him moan about how bored he was, but my daughter was sixteen and at the peak of her need to be driven around all damn day and night. She had her learner’s permit but was still nowhere near getting her driver’s license. Knowing how weary I was of chauffeuring her bratty butt to her job, various friends’ homes and the mall, she dangled her ability to drive like a carrot before me in an attempted extortion plot to buy her a car.

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Episode 42: A leg to stand on

By Ron Harris

Having been training now for over a quarter-century and in a lot of different gyms, there is still one common sight that never ceases to disappoint me. So many times I will see a guy with an upper body that’s anywhere from better than average to highly impressive, but below the waist it seems he’s hardly trained his legs at all. The old joke used to be that in cases like these, there was always the legal danger of the upper body suing the legs for lack of support.

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Episode 41: Take pride in what you’ve built

By Ron Harris

The Internet haters were at it again. Actually, they seemed worse than ever and I chalked it up to the summer heat wave much of the USA was experiencing. When it’s 98 degrees and oppressively humid, they were all probably going through a gallon of Haterade a day. This provided them with all the carbs, electrolytes, and bitter, spiteful negativity a hard-working hater posting anonymously online craves.

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Episode 35: High reps have a purpose

The holidays were upon us at last. Spirits were high all around. A monster of a blizzard had dumped a foot and a half of the light, fluffy stuff on my town on December 20^th, ensuring that all-important White Christmas Big Crosby sang about. As for the Blue Christmas in the Elvis song, we even had that covered with the release of the blockbuster film Avatar, with blue aliens in 3-D.

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Episode 33: The absolute best time to grow

Those of us who have been bodybuilding for much of our lives – well over half, in my case – recognize that our earliest years of pumping iron were very much like the “Honeymoon Phase” in a marriage. In those thrilling days, it’s all fresh and new. You are getting bigger and stronger all the time.

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Episode 32: The True Meaning of Victory

From the expressions on the faces of Jeff and his son Jared as they greeted me in the lobby of the theater as I was leaving, you would think I had just lost a loved one. They both looked like they wanted to shake my hand and softly murmur, “Sorry for your loss.”

And technically, I had lost. At the Team Universe in New York City, the contest I had trained and dieted so long and hard for, I had only managed to place ninth out of thirteen light-heavyweights.

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A Bodybuilder Is Born: Generations Episode 31: You must find your own path

Summer was rapidly coming to an end, and so was my contest diet. As Labor Day was just around the corner, I had three weeks left before I got up on stage again all oiled up in little posing trunks – truly a manly sport! This was the ‘home stretch’ of the diet process, but it was by no means a time to coast. Carbohydrates had been lowered and replaced with CapTri® to keep up energy levels, but that didn’t stop the inevitable fatigue that became my constant companion.

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Contest Dieting, The Ups and Downs

Bitching about the weather is as much of a sport in New England as the Red Sox or the Patriots. But this summer so far was giving us all good reason to complain. Somehow, we were experiencing the soggy, rainy weather normally associated with Seattle. This was bad news not only because it set us up for an infestation of brooding teenage vampires with stylish hair like in the movie Twilight, but it was also limiting our already sparse amount of possible ‘beach days.’ On a recent Sunday when my wife had the day off, we decided to head to the shore for some fun in the sun. This turned out to be a terrible idea, as several million other people also had the same idea.

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