If you’re around my age (21 and a bit…), you may remember a TV show called “The Wide Awake Club”
And on that show there was a guy called Timmy Mallet
And he ran a game named, “Mallet’s Mallet”
If you’re wondering where I’m going with this, bear with me, it will make sense.
I hope!
Anyhow.
Mallets Mallet.
That’s very much the way my brain works.
The game was word association, no repeats, no pauses, the punishment was a whack on the head with a large pink mallet.
It’s fast, it’s chaotic and it comes up with some whacky combinations.
For example this morning I was listening to a podcast on how Fasting and ketosis can be incredibly good for brain health, performance, longevity and has been shown to cause the death of cancer cells.
Then I got a sales pitch message from some fitness company which got a very short reply from me.
I wondered if the message may hurt the peoples feelings.
Then I remembered that Men only have three feelings.
We feel:
Hungry Tired Horny
and that’s it.
Or at least it is for my generation and older.
You see those of us in our mid thirties and up (I’m currently 38), especially those of us that gravitated towards full contact sports, adventure sports, strength training and such like tend to be of the “Old School” persuasion.
Which means we don’t talk.
We lift. We fight.
But we don’t talk.
We don’t admit weakness.
We get hurt, but we don’t show it.
We feel sick, but we hide it.
We feel down, but we power onwards.
We are Batman.
The problem is, even Batman has his breaking point.
And this is where my Mallet’s Mallet brain brought me today.
The subject of men’s health isn’t dealt with, especially by men.
We’re so often so tied up presenting this stoic, tough exterior that we loose sight of what it means to be healthy.
We forget that Batman is a borderline psychotic. He’s a sociopath. Yes, he’s awesome, but c’mon, he’s nuts.
Without the grounding effect of Alfred, he’d have gone of the rails and probably ended up dead.
And this is what the Movember charity is to us men.
At least that’s how it fits into my head.
Movember started out as a bit of a joke, “Lads, grow a mustache and help raise awareness for prostate cancer”
They’ve since widened their remit to all things male health.
Including mental health.
Because the biggest threat to us is ourselves.
Ignoring our weaknesses, not admitting we need help, not asking for directions and never reading the instructions.
Does that sound like you?
That was me.
I’m getting better. I read instructions.
Sometimes….
Wild Geese is not a male only gym, we are close to a maybe 60/40 ration of male to female membership. And on the training floor we don’t differentiate between sexes. We’re all human animals and we all train together.
But we do provide a brotherhood, a tribe, a family.
And I watch, observe and from time to time pull people aside to have a quiet chat and find out why I’m reading distress signals from their body language.
Very often I get stories of homelife/worklife stress, maybe it’s an injury they were keeping quiet.
It doesn’t matter what it is, the fact that in Wild Geese they are safe. The know I’m the Alpha amongst alpha’s, the pack leader. And they know that they have my support regardless of what’s going on.
And this is part of what the Movember charity is working towards.
Giving men permission to lower their guard, remove the cowl and reveal their inner Bruce Wayne.
A video posted by Dave Hedges (@dave_hedges) on Nov 12, 2015 at 7:54am PST
Not everyone has Wild Geese.
But they may have access to a service supported by the money from Movember.
So I ask you to donate.
here’s the link:
http://mobro.co/wgmobros
you can choose not to.
But I’m Batman, I’ll find you, and when I do I’ll smack you over the head with a giant pink mallet.
Regards
Dave “Bruce Wayne” Hedges http://mobro.co/wgmobros