Working out sucks. This is why I love it.
Sometimes my workouts upset me.
A typical workout for me lasts about two hours — which include at least 15 minutes of warming up, and another 10 to 15 minutes of cool-down after. Add to that a brisk walk to the gym, occasional chit-chat with a fellow meathead, a shower, and then dragging myself back home — these are roughly 3 hours of my day.
Three hours — which could be used for reading, meditating, writing, or catching up with friends.
And yet I choose to lift weights till my hands fall off.
And the problem is…
I want to do more of those other things as well.
I enjoy reading, and listening to podcasts — I write down quotes and useful information I could later transfer to my own life. I love writing, which helps me understand my emotions and worries, where they come from and how I can deal with them.
I love meditating — because my head is like a broken radio picking up on all stations at the same time; and only through meditation, I have found ways to declutter my mind and focus on what is important.
I certainly love my friends — when we get to spend time together, I always end up feeling 110% happier and 200% more likely to end the night dancing on the bar counter in a random nightclub.
***
A couple of weeks ago I witnessed a young woman burst into tears in the middle of her training session with personal trainer.
She was doing single leg Romanian deadlifts — without getting into boring details, the movement consists in bending over on one leg until your torso is almost parallel to the floor.
It’s an excellent exercise to build a strong posterior chain, but it sucks. It hurts.
The girl held an empty bar in her arms, and as soon as she rose one of her legs, she immediately lost the balance. Luckily her PT caught her; otherwise, she would have fallen face down on the floor.
Now, why the heck she was given a bar in the first place, rather than a kettlebell or dumbbell — both of which are much more beginner-friendly substitutes — is a topic for another discussion.
What did strike me was that after failing the first attempt she started crying and begged her PT to change the exercise. She stood there in the middle of the weights room and screamed, “But I don’t like it!”. Her PT shrugged and with a puzzled look on his face escorted his client to a leg curl machine.
I don’t want to sound as if I am shaming this girl, kudos to her for just showing up to the gym — but how often in life do you give up once and for all after the first futile attempt?
I tried to remember if there was an exercise which had me choking up with tears — was it tabata on AirBike, or may be weighted walking lunges, or sled sprints, or pretty much any leg day?
But the truth is, I feel like crying during and after every single one of them. I feel hopeless every time I miss the lift.
But I never let myself cry.
Nor do I ever stop in the middle, and decide that since I don’t like it, I can just not do it.
Before I set my foot on the AirBike, before I load the sled with plates, before I stack plates on the bar — I never think “oh this is going to be breezy.”
I don’t even think — I know this is going to SUCK.
I don’t lift weights because I like it so much.
I am not winning a gold medal, or applause from a workout partner, or a post-workout tube of Ben&Jerry’s peanut butter cup ice-cream.
I am winning over that whiny little bitch inside of me who is ready to give up every time confronted with adversity, who feels jealous of someone else’s success, and who refuses to take the blame for her actions.
I am winning over her every time I choose not to respond to spiteful comments; every time I decide not to make them myself.
I am winning over her every time I stay true to my goals and ideas when she tells me to quit.
***
That is the battle we all fight — all at the same time.
The world is not only black and white, and as Terry Pratchett once wrote, “most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.”
Even the most virtuous of us might have malicious intentions. And someone whom you find to be pure evil can have good faith at heart.
It’s the question of who wins this fight.
***
Sometimes it does upset me that exercise takes such a huge chunk of my day.
Working out sucks. This is why I love it.
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