working out

the corollary to spending literally all of your time working for two months is that you have literally no time to exercise. add a three-day cold at the end of your two months of stressful overwork, and you get weakness... truck-fulls of weakness.

i went for a run on christmas day as a gift to myself. it had been almost two months since my last run, and i felt that i had given my plantar fasciitis enough time to heal up. it has not been bothering me much lately, and i've tried to stretch it out when i could, so i felt that it would be a good idea. i could only go 5k though before my legs and lungs both screamed at me to get real and let them stop. full-on corporeal  mutiny.

today, i went to the gym to take a more measured approach to getting back into shape. i got on the exercise bike for a warm-up, but couldn't ride for more than 10 agonizing minutes before feeling like i was going to puke. i worked out on some weak-ass resistance machines to get a measure of where my tolerances where - and it turned out that i have the strength of a 14-year old girl. i stretched out my poor broken heel and started a jog on the treadmill to end the workout... i ran for 15 minutes, and i couldn't go on. after only an hour in the gym, i was done.

this is the worst shape i've been in... in years, but the weird part is that... well, i don't look it. i still have the same approximate shape - i can see that there are muscles under my skin - they just don't have any of their former strength or endurance.

so now i'm faced with a choice. i'll be turning 40 next year. maybe i should just resign myself to a pedestrian level of health, rather than constantly priming myself for urgent battle-readiness. if i had a family or a hobby or something distracting, i might not have 20 hours a week to devote to training, and that would be okay. i don't think that there is anything more frustrating that having to start over from such a diminished condition through hours and hours of sweat and agony just to get back to the same level of fitness that i had just this summer. i've done it more times than i can count, and i'm just a little bit tired of it.

sigh. i plan to go back to the gym tomorrow to work my legs and arms. i know full well that i'll try and climb this grease-pole of fitness once again. it's just incredibly frustrating, and i think that i can certainly understand and appreciate the decision people make to "let themselves go" from their former 14-year old selves.

- g

song of the day for working hard, even when you aren't at work: work hard, depeche mode (yes, this is the b-side to the last DM song of the day - whatever)