My long, boring origin story of failing at the sportsing (as a nerd)

Part I of the Fitness for nerds series.

Patrick Bos
4 min readJul 21, 2020
Every hero needs an origin story. If trying to get fit isn’t heroism, then I don’t know what is.

I’m honestly not sure what help this would be to you.

Maybe you’ll recognize something of your own situation and think: if this moron can do this sportsing, I sure as hell can do it a lot better. Maybe as a psychologist you’ll recognize the telltale signs of mental illness like megalomania, narcisism or just general madness. Either would be best case scenarios.

In any case, I already wrote it down, so I’m just going to publish it.

So, here goes!

As a general geek and later scientist / programmer, physical fitness hasn’t typically been on my radar much. I used to practice judo as a kid and cycled 12 km to high school, so I guess I was pretty fit back then. But at age 18, fresh into university, I immediately started an experimental study into the beneficial effects of complete idleness, inertia and lethargy.

At rare occasions, I would doubt the wisdom of my (lack of) physical strategy, but in the back of my mind, I had these ideas that perhaps all this fitness and sports stuff was a bit overrated, that they mostly just lead to injuries — obviously bad — and, who knows, maybe I was some kind of super human who didn’t need it. I was young…

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Patrick Bos

eScientist / freelancer / HPC & data science / Physics & Humanities / C++ & Python