June 3rd, 2012: I felt it release, finally. There was just some kind of palpable hunch that I had finally let go of more than one pound. And I had. So I’m down three to 263.
I felt “light” this morning, and this caused me to get up earlier than usual – just to check the scale. I thought this good number would energize me for the day, but I may have to lie back down, I’m still pretty sleepy. I ain’t over-training, I promise, but I am working my ass of for this half-marathon. Of course I’m doing my roadwork – putting in my asphalt miles, but I’m also continuing with abs and all kinds of resistance training, and boxing.
The high I get from exercise beats anything I ever got from beer. I love it. In more ways than one, exercise is like the exact opposite of the binge-eating, heavy-drinking lifestyle. When I drank and ate like a pig, the fun came first, it didn’t last very long, and I had to make payments with interest afterword, i.e., binge hangovers and guilt. With exercise, the payment comes first, and it’s still tough, but the payoff is after, and it’s sweet and lasts a long time and doesn’t include guilt.
June 3rd, 2020: One quick comment about June 3rd’s post from 2012, and it’s kind of a reminder. DO NOT EVER LET ANYONE MAKE YOU FEEL GUILTY ABOUT GOING TO THE GYM. If going to the gym means you are there to improve your life, you do not feel guilty about that because there is no legitimate basis for someone to make you feel bad about exercising. This is 100% their problem, not yours. And that goes for while you’re at the gym too. Don’t sit there and wonder if that person is chewing fingernails and worrying about you and the time you spend sweating. Get down to business and allow the world to revolve entirely around you for that small amount of time – do what you gotta do and don’t cut it short for ANYBODY!
Now, on to my next topic: keeping track of performance numbers. Performance stats in the program are about physical fitness improvement. They’re a form of non-scale victory that eventually affects scale victories (there’s usually some lag time between improved performance and weight-loss). There’s a symbiotic relationship between scale victories and physical performance improvement, i.e. as scale numbers improve, generally so will performance – with the exception of pure strength, sometimes you just can’t fling as much iron when you don’t have the bulk behind it anymore.
I’ll address this topic in-depth later, but in my experience, keeping track of my performance in a few select areas has dampened the feeling of aggravation I often develop after expecting a better number than scale gave me. Think about what kinds of things you’d like to improve. We’d all like to be stronger and faster, but that’s not specific enough. Maybe look for one area that’s cardiovascular in nature, one that’s about upper-body strength, one for lower-body strength, one for core-strength, and one for flexibility. More later…
