If You Can Read Dostoevsky You Can Get Fit As You Get Older

Same challenge. Same approach. Same finger when you win.

Author

I just finished reading Crime and Punishment on holiday, and I’ll be honest, as someone who has spent 49 years successfully avoiding fiction, that’s not a sentence I ever expected to say out loud.

Choosing such a book when my Reading-Difficult-Fiction muscles were so weak was certainly… ambitious, (“stupid” according to my wife).

It’s 650 pages long, there are no real paragraph breaks, just walls of dense text, and at several points Dostoevsky spends 4–6 pages describing dreams the main character has.

I’ve written entire Medium articles in less time than it took to read about those dreams.

But here’s the thing, getting through that book taught me more about staying consistent with exercise and working out than most of the fitness articles and videos I’ve consumed in 16 years of coaching.

Stick with me here.

The page 50 problem

By page 50 of 650 I genuinely wanted to quit. My phone was within arm’s reach, full of sports gossip and funny videos, which were considerably more appealing than wondering why nobody had apparently edited this thing, or why Dostoevsky had just taken two pages to describe a man’s tattered clothing in forensic detail.

I kept thinking:

Can I skip this bit, should I just read a summary online and pretend I finished it, is there a better book I should be reading instead?

If you’ve ever started a fitness programme and found yourself two or three weeks in thinking this isn’t working, this is the wrong plan, there’s probably a better approach I haven’t tried yet, that’s your page 50.

The point where the initial enthusiasm has worn off, nothing dramatic has happened yet, and your brain is very helpfully suggesting that bailing is the sensible option.

I kept going.

Twenty or thirty pages at a time to begin with, that’s all I could manage, building up slowly. And when I finished Part 3 of 6 something shifted.

I was at halfway and I thought “ I think I can actually finish this now”

Then in the last third something genuinely strange happened, the book became brilliant. Properly compelling. I couldn’t put it down.

I never would have got there if I’d listened to the voice at page 50.

Your fitness goal is a 650 page book with no paragraph breaks

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There will absolutely be stretches that feel pointless and boring, weeks where the scales don’t move, sessions where you go through the motions and wonder what you’re doing there.

That was the dream sequences in the book for me — I didn’t know if they were adding anything, but I couldn’t just skip them.

But as you chip away week after week, something starts to shift.

Maybe your jeans fit differently. Maybe you lift something you couldn’t have lifted two months ago. That’s your halfway point, suddenly the rest of it feels possible.

And eventually, if you stick with it long enough, you’ll have workouts you genuinely love, you’ll feel fitter than you have in years, you’ll get comments on how you look, and you’ll realise the whole thing was worth it, but you’d never have reached that point if you’d bailed at page 100.

When I finished Crime and Punishment I did something I also do in the gym when I grind out a last rep I wasn’t sure I had in me.

I looked at the book and gave it the finger. Same energy. I won, the book didn’t defeat me.

Feeling stuck with health and fitness? **Fill out my Get Unstuck Form**, tell me a bit about where you’re at and what you’re struggling with, and I’ll come back to you within 24 hours with some specific FREE advice on your situation. I’ve been coaching folks 40+ for 16 years, I can help you out too!

Stop pretending your reasons are sensible

Here’s something most fitness content won’t tell you, and it matters.

You probably won’t stick to an exercise plan primarily because you care about your long term cardiovascular health and bone density.

Those are sensible, grown up reasons to keep going, but that’s not really how our heads work.

We have an emotional brain that operates faster and more powerfully than our rational one, and it’s driven by things like ego, status, how we look to other people, and how we feel about ourselves.

Instead of trying to suppress that and pretending you’re only motivated by sensible reasons, you’re much better off working with it.

I finished Crime and Punishment mainly for egotistical reasons if I’m honest.

I wanted to be someone who has read Dostoevsky. I wanted to be able to mention it in conversation. I wanted to prove to myself I could do something that felt genuinely hard. None of that is particularly noble, but that’s what got me through 650 pages when the alternative was lying by the pool watching videos of dogs doing funny things.

It’s the same with working out. If your real motivation is wanting to look better on the beach, wanting people to notice you’ve lost weight, wanting to feel attractive again, wanting to prove something to yourself, those are completely valid and genuinely powerful reasons to keep going.

Stop apologising for them and pretending that’s not what drives you. Start using them.

When I wanted to quit the book I asked myself how I’d feel telling someone I gave up because it got a bit boring and confusing. The answer was I’d feel pathetic. That’s the emotional brain doing something useful for once, use it to your advantage rather than trying to rise above it.

What finishing something hard actually does to you

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There’s something that happens when you complete something you genuinely doubted you could do, and it’s not just about the result, the weight lost or the book read.

It’s what it does to your sense of what you’re capable of.

I’m now genuinely more confident about reading difficult books. I know I don’t need every page to be gripping to keep going. I’ve proved to myself I can sit with confusion and boredom and difficulty and come out the other side, and that’s a version of myself I didn’t quite have before.

The same thing happens with fitness when you stick to something long enough. You stop being someone who keeps dabbling with workout plans and become someone who actually works out.

You stop needing every session to be exciting or every week to show dramatic results, and instead you embrace the grind because you’ve done it before and you know what’s on the other side of it.

Crime and Punishment is a brilliant book… eventually.

For me it was boring in parts, confusing in parts, and there are sections that feel like they were written while sipping large quantities of vodka. But you should read it anyway.

Your fitness journey is the same. Keep chipping away. Use whatever motivation actually works for you rather than the motivation you think you’re supposed to have.

And when you finally hit the goal that felt impossible when you started, put it down and give it the finger.

You won.

Feeling stuck with health and fitness? **Fill out my Get Unstuck Form**, tell me a bit about where you’re at and what you’re struggling with, and I’ll come back to you within 24 hours with some specific FREE advice on your situation. I’ve been coaching folks 40+ for 16 years, I can help you out too!