By the time I sat down to write the script for Rocky shortly after my twenty-ninth birthday, I had been exercising half my life, but in many ways I was just starting to learn about fitness. Up to that point, my workouts had been erratic and unorthodox, partly because I was flat broke and couldn't afford to get to a proper gym. I remember I had one of those crude 60-pound, turn-of-the-century dumbb