Final

My learning experience has to do with strength training (lifting weights etc.). But this experience isn’t about me conquering my physical goals of becoming big and strong, it’s about competition with my brothers and learning to be competitive without showing off or putting anyone down.  This event in my life is as much a learning experience as it is a bonding experience with me and my five brothers.

When I was around 8-10 years old I spent a lot of time with my father. My dad has a very active mind; he loves competition, arguing, and physical activity. He has a very explosive personality to say the least. So, through absorbing some of his traits (mostly the good ones) I have developed a pretty competitive personality. My father is a very "macho" man, always boasting about fights he's been in and how strong he is and was when he was my age. So I admired him, he made me want to grow to be big and strong like him. I quickly began to set physical goals for myself. I have a notebook from when I was 11 years old that has my push-up and pull-up goals for the year, “I’ll do 50 push-ups, 15 pull-ups and lots of sit-ups everyday”, I was very determined.  I was young so all I knew to do was push-ups, sit-ups, and pull-ups with half assed form, but I did a lot of them. I loved coming to school and bragging to friends about the amount of push-ups I could do. "Check out my six pack!" I'd yell and show the girls my abs, it really felt good on my ego. By the time I hit 16 years of age I was at the point where I could perform 100 solid push-ups and 30 pull-ups three times a day. At this point of my life the only thing I cared about was my personal development and self competition. That soon changed when my brothers got involved.

            The way me and my brothers all began working out together started at the end of junior year, one month before I entered the weight room. My best friend Cameron Koven and I, who’s now a step brother of mine due to our parents falling in love, hung out nearly every second of every day. The two of us are very physical and competitive people, it didn't take long for us to become obsessed with lifting weights and competing in strength related physical activities. Cameron and I went hard talking about serious body builders and strength idols we admired. We would go to the playground at night and do muscle ups, handstands, attempt the dreaded one arm pull up, which was a serious goal of ours, and simply play around and have fun. Soon after my fiend Daniel Ong, who’s an adopted brother of mine, and my little brother Levi Hernandez joined in on our gym lifestyle. It didn’t take long for us to begin competing over who’s the strongest and who can bench more than who.

            My learning experience came into play about a year after my brothers joined me in the weight room. I began to realize that I wasn’t seeing as much gains or even enjoying working since my brothers joined me in the gym. Eventually I began to realize that instead of focusing on improving myself I was putting all of my energy into proving that I was stronger than my brothers, primarily my step brother Cameron since me and him had been working out the longest.  I used try my best to show I was the strongest; I would get very competitive, almost to the extreme. I wanted my brothers to look at me and see someone to admire. For some reason something filled me with the drive to one-up every accomplishment my brothers made. If Cameron benched 185 pounds I’d have to bench 205 pounds. If Daniel did 20 pull-ups I’d have to do 30. I had to be the top dog, and if for some reason I began to feel that I was losing my position I’d start lashing out and pushing people down emotionally. Soon, instead of a friendly competitive environment, I had created a rivalry, me vs. everyone else.

            Until my senior year in high school I hadn’t applied for a single sport. I decided to go out for track and field, since it’s mostly an individual sport and friends kept asking me to join. Cameron and Daniel also decided to join with me. I focused on sprinting since I had no experience in track and sprinting is pretty basic, and as always Cameron and Daniel followed. But, unlike weight lifting where everyone has a fair chance on developing muscle, sprinting seems to be genetic. You’re either fast or you aren’t, and I was fast. Track was the first sport that I had ever attended in high school and I instantly became the second fastest on the team. I decided to drop weight lifting since strength training slows you down majorly, and focused one hundred percent of my ability on speed conditioning. While I was determined to get faster Cameron and Daniel attended track every now and then, but continued focusing on strength training in the weight room.

Track clicked something in me; it caused me to remember the determination I had when I was younger to improve without having to compete with anyone besides myself. I can remember running 200 meters over and over again in pitch darkness at 11pm on the high school track. At the time Cameron and I were having a lot of friction. We had an argument a couple of hours earlier and I decided to go on a run to burn off steam. I ran so that I could get that high, I ran to the point where the only thing I could feel was my breath and the sweat on my forehead. I was thinking of all the times I had been arrogant, all the times that me and Cameron fought over stupid things that really didn’t matter. Then I finally realized something. I realized that the only thing that matters at this point in my life is improving me. I’m young and I have no children, no wife, the only thing that I need to focus on is to work hard at developing myself into an important individual, to compete with no one other than myself and to push myself to my absolute limit in everything that I care about, whether it be school work, making friends, or the gym.

            The only person that I need to spend energy on is me, and spread love to the people that I care about. I’m grateful to have my brothers in my life to help me realize such an important lesson. They’ve taught me that true competition is self competition and that certain people are put in your life not to bring you down, but to help you lift yourself up.