Hi, my name is John and I am tall. Well, not that tall – only 6’2” but I teach first grade, so that makes my daily height discrepancy pretty dramatic. In fact, unless you trim bonsai trees or paint castmetal figurines for a living, I would bet that my life seems taller than yours.
I don’t know if I have some sort of Napoleon complex thing going on or not, but I’ve always surrounded myself by people much smaller than myself. I used to be a professional road bike racer. I was a giant among very small men. Now I like to run – ultra-marathon trail kind of stuff. Just what I need to make myself feel giant is yet another manorexic sport.
In the end, I’ve come to understand that as a pretty solid tall guy (I’m closer to 200lbs than 175…), I have a very different relationship with gravity than do the people that I spend time with. Whether it be running, or riding up a hill, or playing with my little 6 and 7 year olds at recess, I don’t have the strength to weight ratio that little folks do. There is a 7 year old girl in my class who started doing pull-ups with me on the monkey bars every day. Over the course of a month I went from doing 4 to doing 8 in a set. My little workout buddy went from 3 to 27 before she lost interest and went to play on the slide.
When racing bikes, I was advised by a coach that climbing is all strength to weight ratio. I was tired of watching those tiny little men leave me behind the moment the road tilted up. That same coach told told me, that in order to go faster you need to choose – get stronger or get lighter. I really like eating burgers – a lot, so I chose to get stronger. It didn’t work at all. I put muscle on my ass and thighs at such a rate that I could no longer buy jeans off the rack that were within 4 inches of my waist size. Oh yeah – I gained weight faster than I gained strength – failed experiment there.
Thankfully those muscles have atrophied away and now my waist has grown so that I can roll the “square pants” – 34×34. I am a big guy, but not a BIG guy – I had to actually change my body in order to get pants to fit, so thank you Longshot Apparel for not making me grow a beer gut to get a shirt that fits!
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