When I lived in North Carolina, I had a roommate who would use that phrase. Whenever we were going out, he’d ask me “you fixin’ to get ready?”
As a northerner, this use of the word ‘fix’ was new to me. It meant ‘prepare’ rather than ‘repair.’ Which, to my way of thinking, meant the question was rather silly. “You getting ready to get ready?” was redundant. You prepared, then you acted.
As a word guy, I always felt superior when I discovered redundancies. Did you enter your PIN number in the ATM machine? Then you’re impenetrably dense. Even well-established words weren’t out of my target range. One of my favorites was ‘overwhelm.’ To ‘whelm’ means to submerge completely. How can you be more submerged than completely submerged?
..and then, of course, I found out the hard way that it is, indeed possible to be overwhelmed. And I also found out that it’s possible to astonish. ‘Astonish’ is the antonym of overwhelm. Trust me. I’m a word guy.
And I was astonished to discover that it is important to be fixin’ to get ready.
That’s pretty much all I did, training-wise, for the better part of two years. I didn’t know it at the time, but I’d never been one for personal awareness. What I thought I was doing was training. I thought I would get on my bike and ride for a while, then in August I’d ride my bike up a mountain, everyone would go “ooo!” and that would be it.
I don’t know if ‘arrogance’ and ‘ignorance’ are synonyms, but they should be.
Sometime in the early spring of 2009, I changed my goal of riding up Mt. Washington from 2009 to 2010. And then in 2010, I did it again, to 2011. It was more difficult than I had anticipated.
But I kept it up. Which surprised me a little. At one time, it would have surprised me a lot. In fact, it would have astonished me. But times change. I wasn’t just talking about this adventure in some abstract way. I was doing what I could to change myself. I rode my bike all spring, summer, and fall. And when winter came, I bought a trainer, and rode my bike in the basement. 4 or 5 days a week, staring at the cat’s litter box, trying to disappear into my headphones.
Then spring came again, and I got the bike I wanted–the one with a low gear the size of a frisbee, and continued riding outdoors. I put 2,000 miles on that bike that summer. I thought I was training.
Then one day in February of 2011, out of the blue, I realized that if I was ever going to put Mt. Washington behind me, I would have to more than commit to climb it. I would need to actually climb it. You know–put myself on the bike, and put my bike on the mountain, and pedal ’til I reached the top. In other words, do what I said I was going to do.
So I went online to check to see when they would begin registering for the ride. Even though it’s incredibly steep, there are about a thousand or so people who want to ride their bikes up this mountain each year, but only 600 positions available. It’s not unusual for registration to close the day after it opens, so I wanted to make sure I knew when it would open. I was pretty sure it was some time in May.
Turns out the registration wasn’t in May. It opened at 9:00 the next day. And it would cost me $350 to register.
I was astonished. Not only at the freakish timing, but also that I had the $350 to spend. And I got scared. This was it. If I filled out the form and sent in the money, I would be honest-to-God committing to this event. I would literally be putting my money where my mouth was.
And I did it. The next morning I filled in the forms, transferred the money electronically, and giggled. Yes, giggled.
And it was then that I realized for the past two years, I wasn’t actually training for the ride. What I was doing was getting myself into good enough shape to really start training.
I was preparing to prepare.
The time for fixin’ to get ready had passed. It was time to really get ready.
I had to train. Oh, boy.
