Interview with Jim Bathurst – Part II

This is part II of the interview. You can find part I here.

Marc: Do you use kettlebells?

Jim: Yes, I use kettlebells for a variety of exercises. Thanks to my old college buddy, Jeff Steinberg, who first turned me onto them. They’re a fun and useful training tool.

Marc: Do you practise feats of strength like card tearing or nailbending?

Jim: I’ve done card tearing and nail bending in the past (also thanks to Jeff for help on that!). I still have a pile of timber ties and 60D sitting in my closet, but I haven’t bent in awhile. I’ll grab and U a timber tie every so often. I’m looking to start an acrobatic/strongman show sometime in the future, so if I do then I’ll definitely add the card tearing and nail bending back into the training. I love it, but you can only do so much in a day!

Marc: Your tutorials are impressive. How long does it take you to write such a tutorial?

Jim: It takes me forever to write a tutorial. I am a perfectionist, so I need to make sure absolutely every detail is in the tutorial and that it’s written exactly like I want it to be written. Then there’s the picture and video taking, then editing the whole thing. I probably read and reread the tutorial 100 times. So yeah, it takes me a lot of time.

Marc: There’s a shirt with a modified Logo of “Fight Club” on your website. Do you have a special relationship to the novel/movie? What’s your favourite quote from “Fight Club“?

Jim: Fight Club came out my freshman year of college. It was a tumultuous time for me, and the message of the movie hit home. If I had to pull a quote from the movie, I’d say “This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time.” You have to remind yourself to stop wasting the life you have! Whether it’s sitting in a job you hate, or in a situation you can’t stand, or on the couch watching t.v. every night and weekend. From the book, and I’ll paraphase this, Tyler Durden is on the beach talking to the narrator and he’s set up logs of wood in the sand so they stick straight up. The woods casts a shadow and creates a hand, and at one minute each day the hand is perfect and Tyler sits in that perfect palm. He said that it was hard to get that one minute of perfection, but it was worth the effort, and a moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.

Marc: What makes you happy?

Jim: What makes me happy is living simply, controlling my direction in life, and my girlfriend who is as crazy as I am.