My palms are sweating against the glass of the smartphone screen, a cold, clinical moisture that has nothing to do with the 73-degree weather outside and everything to do with the calendar. It is March 13th. The light coming through the window has changed from the weak, apologetic gray of February to a sharp, accusing gold. I just spent forty-three minutes scrolling through my own sent messages from three years ago, a digital archeology of desperation. ‘Can I lose 13 pounds by June?’ I had asked a friend. Then, two weeks later: ‘Down 3 pounds, but I feel like death. Is keto supposed to make your teeth hurt?’ The messages are a testament to a cycle of seasonal madness that treats the human body like a rental property-something to be renovated in a frantic rush before the tenants arrive, only to be neglected the moment the lease is up.

It’s the worst possible motivator because it has an expiration date. When you train for a season, you implicitly give yourself permission to quit the moment that season ends. You aren’t building a lifestyle; you’re building a costume. And the cost of that costume is usually paid in metabolic damage, mental fatigue, and a deep-seated resentment of the very movement that is supposed to keep us alive.

He told me once that the hardest part of his job isn’t the height; it’s the consistency. If he takes a month off, his grip strength fails. If he tries to ‘crash diet’ to look lean for a vacation, he gets dizzy at 103 feet and risks falling. For Emerson, fitness is the architecture of survival. It isn’t a three-month sprint; it’s a 53-week-a-year structural requirement.

But we aren’t all climbing turbines. Most of us are just trying to fit into a pair of shorts we bought in 2013. The problem is that the marketing machine knows our fear. It feeds us the ‘Summer Shred’ and the ‘6-Week Beach Blast’ like they are life rafts, when in reality, they are lead weights. These programs are designed for maximum aesthetic impact in minimum time, which is the exact opposite of what the human body actually needs for longevity. They prioritize caloric deficits that are unsustainable and high-intensity intervals that lead to injury because the goal isn’t health-it’s the photo at the end of June.

When I look back at those old text messages, I see a person who was obsessed with the 83 days between April and July. I see someone who would skip 3 social outings because the restaurant didn’t serve steamed broccoli, only to spend all of August eating pizza over a sink because the ‘goal’ had been met. It’s a Jekyll and Hyde existence. We spend the spring punishing ourselves and the autumn ‘recovering’ from the punishment. We have effectively decoupled the idea of exercise from the idea of well-being. We’ve made it a tax we pay for the right to exist in the sun.

This is where the logic breaks down. If you view fitness as a seasonal chore, your brain will naturally seek the path of least resistance. This leads to the yo-yo effect that ruins so many metabolisms. You drop 13 pounds in a frantic burst of 3-mile runs and salads that taste like disappointment, and your body, thinking it’s in a famine, prepares for the inevitable rebound. By the time the first leaf falls in September, you’ve gained 23 pounds back because you can’t live in a state of emergency forever.

Emerson P.K. doesn’t have a ‘rebound’ because he doesn’t have a ‘peak.’ He just has a baseline. His training involves 3 core principles: functional strength, cardiovascular endurance, and enough body fat to actually fuel his brain during a 13-hour shift. There is a quiet dignity in that. There is a rejection of the idea that his body is an ornament. Sometimes, when the wind is too high and he can’t climb, he still does his 43 minutes of mobility work on the ground. Not because he wants to look good in a tank top, but because his joints need to move.

If we shifted our focus to year-round maintenance, the panic would vanish. Imagine it’s March 13th, and instead of feeling dread, you feel… nothing. Because you’ve been moving your body since October. Because you’ve been eating for energy since January. This is the philosophy of sustainable growth found at

Fitactions, where the emphasis isn’t on the quick fix but on the permanent habit. When fitness becomes a background process-like breathing or the humming of a turbine-it loses its power to terrify you. You don’t need a ‘transformation’ if you never let yourself become something you hate.

I remember a text I sent on July 3rd, three years ago. It said: ‘I’m at the pool, but I’m staying in my shirt. I didn’t hit the target.’ That target was an arbitrary number on a scale that ended in a 3. I sat there in the heat, sweating and miserable, because I had failed a test that I had written myself. I wasn’t looking at the water or listening to the music. I was a prisoner of a seasonal goal. I had spent 83 days working for a moment I wouldn’t even let myself enjoy.

That was the year I stopped. I started looking at the way Emerson P.K. moves. I started thinking about 43-year-old men who can still play tag with their kids and 73-year-old women who hike for 3 hours every Sunday. They don’t have ‘summer bodies.’ They have bodies that work. They have bodies that have survived 13-thousand different iterations of themselves.

We are more than a collection of seasonal aesthetic markers. We are biological machines that require 3 main things: movement, nourishment, and rest. When we turn those things into weapons of self-criticism, we lose the very health we claim to be seeking. The wind turbine doesn’t spin faster just because it’s sunny; it spins because it was built to withstand the pressure of the air, regardless of the month.

I want to be built like that. I want to reach August and realize I haven’t thought about my weight in 63 days because I was too busy living. I want to be like Emerson, standing 263 feet above the world, knowing that my legs are strong enough to hold me there, not because I’m preparing for a photo, but because I’ve done the work every single day. The summer body is a ghost. It’s a myth sold to us by people who want to sell us tea and leggings. Forget the beach. Train for the life you have to live when the sun goes down and the 13th of September rolls around. The goal isn’t to look good for three months; it’s to be capable for eighty-three years.