What are you training for?

Experimentation as practice

Overheard in my weightlifting group:

“What are you training for?”

“Old age.”

I chuckled at that answer, and completely relate.

Ever since I started weightlifting in earnest a couple years ago, I am far more invested in the twin underdogs, ‘Inner Thigh Day’ and ‘Hamstring Day,’ than their more popular, vanity boosting cousins (‘Outer Glutes Day’ is always packed!).

That’s because inner thighs and hamstrings are going to keep me from wobbling to and fro on the subway and breaking my hip. Any time I hear “stabilizing muscles,” I’m immediately in. And don’t get me started on grip and ankle strength, concepts which have never crossed my mind as priorities in the abs-focused days of my 20s.

I, too, am training for old age. And, let’s face it, my current age.

I thought about the question for the rest of the day.

“What are you training for?”

That word “training” particularly struck me as a potentially self-compassionate concept, not just the property of tough boot camps and scary sports coaches.

It has the same levity as “practicing,” with a merciful implication of imperfection. An easy synonym would be “preparing for,” but I like how “training” pertains to the process itself.

Starlets on Park Avenue had been training all winter for their Manhattan debut!

These days, I google “abdominal pain pregnant” once a day (to see if anything’s changed?) as my insides rearrange themselves and stretch beyond their wildest dreams.

One of the possibilities that always comes up is “Braxton Hicks contractions,” explained to me as the uterus training for labor.

I thought this was so cute!—my body doing her equivalent of piano scales or DuoLingo games. The idea really endeared me to the sweetness of the body, and made me think about how training must be so inherent to being a living thing that even a uterus understands the value.

I find the “What are you training for?” question to be orienting and grounding, but I can see how it could stir up some anxiety about that dreaded concept of FINDING YOUR PURPOSE or achievement-focused living which will inevitably lead to disappointment (and probably becoming a very annoying person to be around).

The fun of this question is that there are a million ways to be in training, and the joy of answering it is that there is wonder in the mystery of the result.

For one obvious example from my life, I knew as a teenager that I wanted to be a communicator some day, and would have happily taken that title in the form of writer, teacher, priest, or food justice lobbyist—to name a couple ideas.

I also knew as a teenager that the best writers (or food justice lobbyists, probably) have a lot of life experience. And I had none of that. I hadn’t experienced heartbreak, grief, risk, and true adventure. I hadn’t even worn a two-piece bathing suit or experimented with bangs yet.

I had so much life to live!

And I knew that—which is why I started training to become a writer (or whatever) by living as much life as I possibly could: purposefully putting myself in the messy and tangled situations that can only unravel into a good story.

I didn’t know exactly what my training would result in, but I got so good at being in messes and nightmares and states of wonder, that all of a sudden I had no choice but to start telling my tales!

And I couldn’t have known this as a teenager, but some day the “smart phone” would be invented, followed by something we call “social media,” and then this photo-sharing thing called “Instagram,” and then I would get the idea to “post” illustrations on said Instagram, and it just so happened that illustrations (a medium I’ve always enjoyed) fit perfectly and miraculously into the zeitgeist at the same time I was going through my life’s greatest hardship and used the project to help me heal…

…and I’d been training for that moment long before the Valencia filter was a twinkle in my eye.

Another clear example is how I found Mr. Mari. I thought about that while reading this poignant essay on training to answer the question, “Do I want kids?”

I remembered how I spent years doubting what I knew I wanted in an effort to be a chill and easygoing and open-minded dater…when the truth was, I had always known what I was looking for. I only wish I had trusted myself sooner.

But, my self-trust kicked in at the right time: ruthlessly thumbing through Hinge profiles in the most businesslike, determined version of myself (spiritually wearing shoulder-pads and holding a big car phone between my shoulder and cheek as I flipped through the digital Rolodex).

As soon as I saw Mr. Mari’s profile, I generously looked past the fact that he was from New Jersey and zoned-in straight to the little stroller icon on his profile that so few Hinge Hopefuls took advantage of:

“wants children” it read.

That two-word detail spoke to so many qualities I was looking for: availability, readiness, stability, desire for commitment and family in a city-wide dating pool where those traits aren’t valued nearly as much as being a model-DJ.

This was also the first time in my dating app career when I also admitted “wants children,” which even in the perfectly settle-down-able age of my mid-30s ran the risk of sounding desperate, clingy, even idealistic.

Keep an open mind!!! everyone advised me during my dating years. You just never know what you want!!!

Well I finally DID know what I wanted, and that night he was online at the same time I was. And the second I hit send on my opening message, “Hey Mr. Mari, you have a great smile!”

I knew what all my training had been for.

Three years later, when I told him I was pregnant, he responded, “I met you on an app!” and we laughed at how wonderfully funny life is.

But it made all the sense in the world: we’d been training for each other and this moment for decades.

“Going through hell teaches you what you want,” he tells me. Hell is one of the more advanced training programs indeed.

I’ve also witnessed this well-trained preparation in the lives of others, which always wood-fire-warms-up my heart.

Take these two stories…

1. Illustrator Loryn Brantz had been training to parent her child with special needs:

I’ve heard people ask: ‘Why bring a child into this world?’ With climate change, and all that. Would you choose to be born? My answer is yes. Even during the apocalypse I’d want to be alive. So I could have a few more minutes in the shelter, with my family, watching on TV as the fireballs fall from the sky.

Maybe I’m weird like that. My husband is a little weird too. So it just makes sense that now we have this weird, magical kid. Dalia is 2.5 now. She wears her little helmet, and braces. We take little walks, and see the city, and look at trees. Her condition makes it hard to wake up in the morning, so we get to have thirty minutes of huggy time. And any time she smiles it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.

It’s not easy. There’s a lot of doctor visits. Therapies every day. But I danced when I was young, so I’m used to repetitive movements. Everything in my life just makes it seem like I was meant for this child. I think she’ll live independently one day. Either that, or I get to live with my best friend forever.”

2. Fred Sirieix had been training to comfort his daughter at the Olympics:

He doesn’t specifically talk about how he became the ideal father to remind his Olympian that “It’s only sports: some days you win and some days you lose” but a brief scan of his bio and his experience with sports commentary hint that he has a broad perspective of what actually matters in life, no doubt fueled by his own bad days.

And while she had been specifically training for this exact moment to shine at the biggest competition of her life, Andrea had been unknowingly training to grieve and transcend the loss—knowing it didn’t alter her worth.

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Mr. Mari is currently devouring the book Tiny Experiments, which is deeply nourishing his auto-didactic spirit, and I love that for him!

(I’m too easily triggered when tech-bro culture appropriates concepts that have been in the ultra-feminized “self-help” space forEVER…but he’s been giving me the highlights as he reads. :)

The book “shows how to separate ambition from rigid linear goals, allowing uncertainty to bloom into possibility and a meaningful life to emerge organically,” which is such an important distinction.

I resonate so with the spirit of ambition, but not with schemes toward particular achievements—especially the linear kind.

And I’ve found time and time again that all those moments I was training for but didn’t know it had a life of experiments and “hm that sounds interesting”s to thank.

This is how we train for things we don’t even know are coming: By following our curiosity around.

Example: I moved to Spain for a season to take intensive flamenco lessons, a couple hours a day.

Why? I don’t remember. I don’t think I ever knew. I just wanted to.

A month and a half in, I contracted Guillain-Barré Syndrome and found myself paralyzed. There was a small epidemic in that part of Spain, so I had fellow GBS buddies at the local hospital.

Miraculously, I recovered quite quickly—the quickest recovery in the group, by far. That’s not because I’m a better person, or because I did anything that they should have known to do.

But, I do attribute my relatively fast healing (which still took a year!) to the intensity of those flamenco lessons and how strong my legs had become the weeks leading up to paralysis.

And I couldn’t have known then that my worthless stupid horrible disease was the very best training for other big moments of life—pregnancy a minor one among the very many.

All because I was curious about flamenco dancing.

You know that Mary Oliver poem that asks “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Of course you do, because you’ve seen it on pillowcases and Stanley Cups and coffee mugs and journals in the discount bin at HomeGoods. It’s become a motivational cliché, perfect to place in loopy cursive at the beginning of a goal planning notebook.

But if you read the whole thing, you’ll realize she’s speaking to a grasshopper—who can’t goal-plan—and the punch of the poem is that aliveness is our greatest accomplishment.

And with that in mind, we’re really off the hook as far as other achievements are concerned.

Yet it’s somehow also an invitation to keep training: for the moments we have yet to go through, the decisions that have yet to occur to us, and the good death that completes our life—what we are all ultimately training for as we ephemerally exist in bodies on this earth.

Announcements announcements!

MY BOOK IS AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER:

I was beyond chuffed to get an endorsement from the illustrious Adam Grant for this project! He says:

“A beautiful book on bringing out the better angels of our nature. By carefully observing the animal kingdom, Mari Andrew brilliantly illuminates how we can get in closer touch with our humanity.”
~Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of HIDDEN POTENTIAL and THINK AGAIN, and host of the podcast Re:Thinking

Order here!

LAST CHANCE EVER TO GO TO A MARI RETREAT!

This spring, I’ll teach my FINAL RETREAT, this time near NYC. Early summer upstate will be glooooorious and the weekend will be such fun as we delve into creative PLAY!

BUILDING CREATIVE MUSCLE
June 6-8, 2025 in Rhinebeck, New York

Getting There: Easy peasy from NYC! Take the Amtrak from Moynihan Station to Rhinecliff, and from there is a 15-ish-minute taxi to Omega.
REGISTER HERE!

THIS COULD BE YOU!