It’s been one year, 365 days of Hati and Skoll who chase the sun and moon, since I brandished a certain two words into my vocabulary, Centurion Method. One year since I took myself off into the woods, and starting doing pushups on a dead tree, and lifting a stone in the French island of Montreal. This is where I started, and have been taken to 4 different countries, and all over different bioregions of the land, in Canada, United States, Norway and England. I have taken the method from the urban streets of Montreal, to the wilderness of Northern Ontario, the farms of the Shire, the fjords and forests of Oslo, the polluted cesspools of Londinium, the badlands of California, an old Roman towns and a seaside island village, and the cathedral town of Coventry. I currently reside in Northumbria near to the border of Scotland, a fitting location methinks of the grandeur gifted by the North. I think back to the rather civilized and comfortable being I was before I was initiated in the Centurion Method. My first thoughts picking up the book were of intimidation, confusion, and a mysterious sense of awe at the same time. All my kin were doing it, and it seemed pretty badass so let’s try it out. I risted my name in runes on the wolf blazen cover, and made my way through the pages of this tome. Beserkers, Barbarians, Shield Maiden and Spear wifes we are called, not as fleeting ego-driven pseudonyms were these titles adopted but as a statement of who we were, and where we were going. The best way to describe our physical state when engaged in a workout, while thoughts of Viking elite, Centurion legionmen, and Ancient savages encapsulated the blood that rushed to our heads and hearts. At one point, there were three of us, my comrades in the French lands oath to CM, but time and personal questing has increased the distance between us. I like to think they have taken up the method for good though. Some of the most visceral workout rituals occured between the three of us; beside a frozen river of rapids in the dead of midwinter, and inside an abandoned tunnel with stalagmites and stalactite ice formations, while we curled and thrustered 25kg ice blocks above our heads. Winter had already fucking come, and heavy when I started working through the routines on a disciplined 4 a week, moving up to 5 and a primal with daily yoga. Since the dawn of that time, I have never once done any of them indoors, have never stepped foot in a gym, or used any manmade gear save for a sledgehammer for my workouts. This is a sentiment I have kept close to my black heart. Centurion Method was never about the comfort and convenience of the facility with a heated lounge, or the trainer standing by your side to make sure you don’t hurt yourself. The only teacher you get is the elements and the landscape in which you make testament upon with blood, sweat, and soil. The rocks, roots, timber, gravestones, and hammer, my tools. The water, the broken concrete, the groves, the fjords, the desert dunes, the heath, and snow deepened trails, my platform. This is the genetic oath to the evolving human animal and my place therein, as one if it’s latest representatives.
Going from eating cheap bulk food to feasting myself on the finest Ayurvedic Indian dishes of several helpings, Nordic meat, one pound of a porridge breakfast with 5+ different kinds of seeds, nuts and fruit and honey mixed in, Proteing supplements with enough calories to satiate a small deer, and enough milk and bread in one week to supply a small farmhouse for twice as many. My diet has changed considerably, because I am simply doing more. I could not function on the Centurion Method. I feel superior health these days, and with the rather exhausting tramp lifestyle I have been leading as of late, it has been a certain well of energy that keeps me active nearly 8-12 hours a day. It is like the most potent drug, that courses through my veins. The need of becoming and overcoming. The sweet feeling of gifting yourself with full control over how you look. I have felt tiredness unmatched, after repetitive repetitions of rocks lift greatly bigger than my own head, arctic cold temperature in Canadian blizzards and -42 celsius, the sweat from my brow like the taste of the sea. It has taken what I thought I was capable of, dismantling it, fixing it to a conveyor and pulling me higher and higher up the slopes. Everytime I look down, I see those I left behind jeering at me with an awful sneer.
Over this span of time, I have met a whole tribe of individuals who think along the same parameters that I do. They have been my comrades and womanly allies, and I have observed their growth as directly as I see my own. The hardening of the flesh and growing of muscle were the keystones of every new progress picture. As we started to leave our fairly domestic conditions behind us and forge ourselves under tougher laws, sharpening our mind tools, and altogether living to the full. The WoV, and the inventors of the method have been keen inspiration for me, as well as the personalities that didn’t really come out of the shadows with any presence, but was known they too knew the method, the military men and CrossFit trainers, more experienced in the ways of primal fitness. When I look at a photo taken of me from midsummer, last year, I am not by any means embarassed but can see the definite progress made on my form, and a more confident eye, the formalhaut that pierces with the same fire as Odin’s pledge. As the method rolled on, a workout that I thought would be near impossible one week, would become totally accomplishable the next, and usually with strict manner. I have not received any serious injuries, just a few sore joints, and sprained wrist on one occasion. An essential element of Centurion Method for me was knowing my threshold, being able to push up to it, to the breaking point, and then returning another time to push it further, always doing that extra repetition, the extra second faster, or the slightly heavier weight. I have dabbled into other fitness methods throughout the course the Centmeth has carved into my life, some that stayed, others which were fleeting and non essential. Parkour, The Natural Method (adapted from tribal people), Hatha, Vinyasa, and Aghora Yoga, and even the odd CrossFit thrown in. For now, my attentions are a brew of CM, Sigurd, wilderness fitness and my own primal method, Pillars of Ygg. I worship at the altar of the ideal man, sex, and ritual. Every workout because a sacred performance of the being sloughing off one skin and growing another, the physique of our kind demands the attention of the finest human specimens of this world, and sexual prowess fills the grey paradoxes of the love myth. In this third millenium, I see it to be of vital importance for the resurgence of organic evolution contra the scholarly, glass spectacle wizards who seems to be the oracular scientists of all mans future queries. This is the pseudo understanding most have of evolution, and I personally believe that we are humbled by nature’s rugged laws, and have nowhere near reached the stage of transcending them. If disaster strikes or if you ever want to have that cabin off the grid in the Scandinavian wilderness, you are going to need to toughen up and take what you need, find the people that will inspire you to get there, and act in the flesh. These are the lofty ideas of my fate, my wyrd, and I intended to stick my hand in the web and some weaving of my own.
:aferalspirit: 