The Universal and Unique of Your Biology

Two essential ways to respect yourself on the road to manhood.

I have proposed that manhood isn’t about something defined that we become, but the journey from boyhood (being born male) to a healthy self-determined adulthood. With that comes six critical ideas on what the journey of manhood (as opposed to the journey to manhood) would entail:

• Honoring your biology while

• growing beyond cultural expectations,

• overcoming cultural obstacles, and

• healing your psyche, to

• discover your most authentic self and

• use your gifts to serve the world.

I will unpack these in upcoming posts, starting with honoring your biology and this post on the universal and the unique.

How Running (Almost) Ruined My Body

In the summer of 2020, while the whole world was locked down because of Covid, I ran. When I got done running, I ran some more. And if that wasn’t enough, I put in a few more miles. It wasn’t just me trying to cope with the chaos and a new roommate who was becoming increasingly unhinged, I was training to run from rim to rim to rim through the Grand Canyon, a 46-mile route from the South Rim to the North Rim and back to celebrate my 46th birthday. Then, in early August, I boinked.

Now, to be clear, I didn’t bonk as I could have kept running. This wasn’t a nutrition issue. This was a boink, as my entire system went out of wack and I needed a far bigger intervention rather than just adding some extra carbs.

I couldn’t sleep, and even when I did I felt sluggish. I was always irritable and the smallest annoyance would have me raging. My runs got ugly and the runner’s high disappeared. While I never got tested for it, based on my symptoms and what happened when I changed my training routine, it seems rather clear that over-endurance training spiked my cortisol and crashed my testosterone.

Everything Sits On A Bell Curve

This story highlights the intersection of the universal and unique. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not a big guy. I have long and lean bones and muscles that match. I’m not built for bulk. For a long time, I felt like I was a lesser man because my body did not match up with cultural conceptions of what a “real man” looks like.

Whether it’s a physical trait or something more psychological like competitiveness, all of the characteristics associated with manliness sit on a spectrum, and that spectrum is shaped like a bell curve. According to the book “T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us” (affiliate), here’s what it looks like when it comes to height, comparing men with women:

One of the issues with our culture (more on that in future posts), is that we treat the peak of the bell curve as normative, often making those at the median and even more so the tail feel inadequate.

If I’d been born in my grandparents’ generation, I might have gone for this Charles Atlas ad:

That said, while it always bothered me, I never found myself all that motivated to do something about my “bag of bones” figure, at least not anything that took effort (so I would have ordered the free book and let it collect dust). Ultimately, at some level, I accepted the reality that the body I have is part of my uniqueness, and when I decided to exercise, I focused on endurance over strength.

But, in attempting to honor my uniqueness I ignored the universal, specifically that, as a male, I need to be intentional about keeping my testosterone level up, especially once it started to deplete naturally sometime around my 30th birthday. Instead of engaging in activities that would boost it, I went for one that allowed it to plummet and set my body up for catastrophe.

Honoring My Universal and My Unique

After doing a bit of research I stopped running for a few weeks, ordered some resistance bands, and started doing basic strength training exercises that would boost my testosterone. Before long, I felt back to normal, but knew I had to do something to keep myself from crashing again. Today, I do group HIIT classes 5-6 days a week through Dryland at Gravity Haus. How does this honor both my universal and my unique?

Part of my history means that I’m still somewhat clueless about what to do in the gym. To counter this, I take classes to make sure I get a great blend of endurance and whole-body strength training.

Moreover, Gravity Haus’ classes vary each day, meaning if I go Monday through Thursday, I’ll get two endurance and two strength workouts, and the strength workouts will cover every muscle group in the body (they break it down as push, pull, hinge, and squat). After that, Friday and Saturday are just great whole-body workouts.

Adding to it, I choose HIIT partially because I’m done in 45 minutes, but also because it uses more dumbbells and kettlebells than barbells, which still don’t get me all that excited.

As a result, just a few days away from starting my 50th trip around the sun, I am the fittest I’ve ever been and I think I look pretty damn good getting out of the shower. But much more importantly, I feel great, sleep like a baby, and have the patience of a Zen Master.

So what are some of those universal things guys specifically need to pay attention to and how can we tell if something is off? That’s coming in the next couple of posts, but first, how do your universal and unique intersect?