Oh, Praise God, it's Friday

Thank god blogging is, by its very nature, pretty self-indulgent, 'cos I'm going to be just that.

I hurt, pretty much everywhere. Whole-body weariness. No workout this morning. I spent about 45 minutes stretching last night, another half-hour this morning, and my back still feels like my hamstrings are mutinying on me.

I had a coworker who'd told me how her hamstring snapped once. "You'd better stretch," she grumbled.

So, I'm going to give myself a pass today and tomorrow, and do yoga for a change of pace Sunday, but a full 60-minute session.

There's a forecast for some snow tonight! It's the middle of April! What the fuck?

Blah. Good time to give myself a two-day break. I'm going to do this same routine, maybe more, next week. I'm sure I'll have the same "ohmigod my hamstrings are hamstrung!" feeling again, but I suspect only for next weekend, and then I'll have more or less adjusted, so I won't have the low back pain as a result of the hamstringyness. I'm getting used to the "push it out, pain, push it out, little bit of pain, push it out, just tense" cycle of rehabbing now.

I suspect a moment will come sometime this weekend where I get a little worked up over finally delivering a pretty punitive week of kamikaze conditioning, mostly because there have been times I thought I'd never become capable of getting 90-minute workouts in back to back, let alone three days in a row.

And maybe it sounds stupid to fit, active people, but until you've lived plagued with injuries and really bad health issues for more than half of a lifetime, you'll never, ever understand.

Okay, I'm having that moment now. As a kid, I was always sick, I never got to play the sports. I tried, and I wanted to, but I didn't, couldn't, and I always felt left out as a result. It's worse than getting picked last, not being picked at all when you can't even play.

Then I never got healthy. Everytime I'd try walking and/or running, it'd hurt. I'd whine about it, people would say "You're unfit, just do it and it'll get better". And it wasn't until about a year or two after I got the job I have now that I found out I needed orthotics. Suddenly walking wasn't so bad. If only someone had listened sooner, if only I'd had less pride and been more insistent that it didn't feel right.

Then I began getting fit in 2003, for the first time in my life, really pushing to try new sports and stuff. I was swimming, cycling, doing Pilates, hiking... it was awesome. Then I had the car accident and everything came to a screeching, painful halt.

I was rehabbing and just getting past all the pain, starting to get fit again, when I almost died in the scooter accident. The next two years were a write-off as I went through a whole world of weird I can't possibly nutshell.

My whole life, I've been hindered or scared or just quit when it started to get hard. I promised myself this year would be the year I prove a few things to myself, and I guess I've begun the proving process.

And I have no delusions about just how hard this is going to be on me, I think it's going to be a gruelling six months ahead of me, and it'll try my patience, but... I'm starting to think I can do all the things I've got in mind.

The one thing that's new is my mindset. I can't really hammer down why, or maybe I don't want to share it yet, but things are changing for me at a pretty deep level, and it's really overwhelming right now. I need to hang on to it, though. I need to keep this mental state alive for a while, because it could be the fuel for this fire I'm trying to get raging.

In the meantime, I think April's going to be spent hurtin' something fierce as I try to push past the pain initiation of a new regimen. Bear with me, 'cos I think some more whining's ahead.