A Fitness Dream Deferred: Making Your Fitness Dream A Reality

Langston Hughes, the African-American poet, wrote a poem in the early 20th century entitled A Dream Deferred. The poem is as follows:
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like as raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore-
And then rot?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

The word deferred is define as to exempt temporarily from induction; to put off action or delay; keeping something from occurring until a future time; decide to do something later on; procrastinate; postpone; yield respectfully in judgment/ opinion; to refer.

I propose What Happens to a Fitness Dream Deferred? You may ask how this relates to fitness or wellness. The theme of this poem has to deal with postponing one’s deepest desires can lead to destruction. This can be seen in the clients that I work with on a daily basis. They come in with a goal i.e. weight loss, performance enhancement, or muscle mass gains; however, during the course of the journey, the goal becomes postponed never to be reached.

The questions in the poem are all rhetorical questions, because they intend to answer themselves. The question “What happens to a dream deferred?” appears to be answered with nothing but more questions. But if we analyze each question we get an idea of what the speaker really believes about dreams/goals being postponed. At the same rate, clients who have a goal may experience a dream deferred. The “dream” that the speaker is describing can be translated to a fitness goal, not just dreams experienced during sleep. The dream is important to the client’s life. But what dream is it exactly? The poem does not choose the dream but leaves it up to the reader. Nevertheless, the speaker’s position is clear that any important goal that must be delayed can have serious negative affects. As we look at each question we find out what those affects are. With each question the speaker offers a possibility of each negative affect.

The first stanza “Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun”: a raisin is already dry, and as a raisin, it is a good thing, useful and nutritious, but if a raisin is left in the sun to dry up, it becomes hard and impossible to eat; its value sucked out, it no longer serves its useful, nutritional purpose.

The goal is central to what makes the client a valuable member of society, their self-worth. But suppose that person with the goal is told they cannot fulfill it just yet; they must wait until the trainer decides when they can lose the weight, or the nutritionist decides when it is time for them to change their diet.

What if the client has to take some other fitness goal that he/she lacks interest in i.e. the client comes in wanting to loss weight but the trainer decides for the client that they will work on functional training? What if they have no idea how long it will take to lose the weight (which usually is the case when most clients come in)? And what if they feel that perhaps they can never lose the weight or reach the goal? What happens then?

Surely, their aspiration to attain their goal will dry up, if they are not allowed to develop it. If the goal does not dry up, maybe it will “fester like a sore-/ And then run.” If you have a sore, you want it to dry up so it will heal, but if it festers and runs, that means it is infected and will take longer to heal. The goal that festers becomes infected with the disease of restlessness and dissatisfaction that may lead to gaining more weight, dropout, burnout, doubt, self- worthlessness, resentment, or even striking back at those who are deferring their goal.

Perhaps a goal put off too long is like meat that had rotted. Dead animal flesh that some people use for food will turn rancid and give off horrible odors if not used within a certain period of time. If the goal is not realized in a timely fashion, it may seem to decay because it dies.

The goal may “crust and sugar over-/Like a syrupy sweet?” If you leave pancake syrup or honey unused for several months, and you go back to fetch the bottle, you might find that there is crusty accumulation on the top of the bottle and the contents are no longer unable. Lack of use had formed that crust, that hard material that is no longer useful because no longer pliable. The goal forced to sit idle hardens into an unusable substance of thoughts that have separated themselves from the goals, and formed idle destructive thoughts that are crusted over to despair, doubt, anger, and hatred.

The second stanza is not a question bet merely a “maybe” suggestion: maybe the goal just sags like trying to carry something heavy. A heavy load makes one walk slowly, makes one clumsy as they try to move under the load. The goal not realized may become heavy to bear, because it still weighs on one’s mind with musing like “what might have been”, “if only”, “I guess I’ll never know”, “the one that got away.” All these useless thoughts that dip back into the past, weigh heavy on the mind that has had to defer a goal. This sagging under a heavy load might lead to depression and mental lethargy.

The last stanza returns to the question again, but this time instead of a simile, the speaker employs a metaphor of an explosion. What explodes? Bombs explode and cause great destruction. If all the other possibilities of a deferred goal are bad with some worse than others, then the last possibility is the worst. If the person whose goal is deferred loses all hope, they might “explode” with their despair. Never to revisit or accept whatever the current outcome of fitness has left them or more importantly festering over to other areas of life in which they want to achieve but associate the failure from this goal into those areas of their life.

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