What do Clint Eastwood & Lance Armstrong have in common?

Both are fixtures of the mythological American landscape, epitomizing cool and balls to the wall brio. Clint Eastwood made his early reputation portraying the lone outlaw up against evil forces, cool under pressure, supremely able to tackle the challenges he encounters on his journey. Lance Armstrong, in similar outlaw fashion, slayed the devil cancer, and turned around to take on the Tour de France for a historic seven wins. Both share the mystique of the loner pitting himself against insurmountable forces. While Clint’s heroes were fictive, Lance Armstrong is as flesh and blood real as it gets and because of that his accomplishments are all the more staggering.

Athletic pursuit takes a specific kind of courage each and every time. Testing your body and mind not just to get up and do it, but do it faster, heavier, and further than the time before. At this moment in modern time, that’s about as outlaw as it gets. Let’s be clear – we’re not talking outlaw in the self-destructive sense of chemical dependency, or the ugly reality of law-breaking and prison, but outlaw in the best American tradition, the lone pursuit of farther, harder, more.

To test oneself over and over and over again has a certain commonality with outlaw behavior (as it’s romantically perceived to be). There’s no denying the brain chemical induced sense of well-being or the embrace of some measure of physical pain. Athletes pursue the physical pain first, holding out for the ensuing euphoria, as opposed to the pleasure first, pain later of alcohol, nicotine or other controlled substance ingestion! It’s no accident that many successful recoverers from drug and alcohol addiction are individuals who have substituted athletic endeavor for their former drug or drugs of choice.

I embrace the concept of the athlete as outlaw, a modicum of cool in the swagger founded on the knowledge of one’s ability to lift one’s body weight or more; the confidence in running farther, faster than much younger runners; the all-out insanity of entering a race encompassing not one or two but three sports; the Crossfit ethos of train until you puke, while becoming proficient at performing handstand pushups, (among other things) in a multidisciplinary, elite forces method, mosh pit of activity guaranteed to generate true physical fitness.

Discover your inner-outlaw athletes. He/She is the one who’ll help you locate the guts to take your athletic pursuits to the next level and struggle through the inevitable plateaus and frustrations that go hand in hand with training and competing. Enjoy the training induced highs with the complete satisfaction that they are your body’s way of rewarding you for keeping it strong, fit and flexible. Best of all the sleek musculature of a serious athlete is supremely cool in it’s own right.

Written by Victoria Nordgren. Victoria Nordgren, the founder of nordgren – women’s performance activewear at http://www.nordgrenactive.com/ is an avid cross trainer living in New York City.
Her weekly fitness blog can be found at http://nordgrenactive.com/wordpress2/
Please feel free to contact Victoria at [email protected]