Just Looking For Something Positive

 Because all I’ve been getting lately is negative. 

Before I even start, this isn’t aimed at anyone who reads this. This is mostly about Sam. And if I don’t get it out somewhere, I’m pretty much going to explode and probably punch him in the face. 

Last summer, I told myself – and everyone else – that I was going to climb Mount Katahdin in Maine this year. That was something that is going to happen. In April (March?) I started taking the steps I needed to take in order to make that desire a reality. I got myself a personal trainer. I have been working on my physical fitness. I have been working daily towards meeting my goal of being physically capable of performing a feat that I know is beyond difficult. I meet with my trainer in person once a week. He sends me emails for daily workouts. Four days of work, one day of rest, rinse, lather, repeat. That is my workout schedule. 

Twelve weeks I have been working with Trainer Tim. Twelve weeks ago, I couldn’t do half of the things that I can do today. I had no upper body strength to speak of. I could not do a push up, let alone a full plank push up from the floor.  I can do ten full plank push ups without stopping now. I couldn’t do ten situps without stopping somewhere around five or six to catch my breath. I can do fifty without even thinking about it now. I couldn’t run for more than a full minute without stopping because I was out of breath. I can run a 5k without stopping now. I can pull a fully loaded Jeep Wrangler – with all the doors on, thankyouverymuch – across a parking lot, uphill, with my trainer sitting in driver’s seat, with my bare hands. I am running faster, jumping higher and farther, lifting, pulling, and pushing – harder and faster and stronger – longer than I ever have before. (Now that that last sentence is typed out, I realize it is a weird mix of the Lonely Island and Daft Punk. I’m okay with it. It sounds good.) 

In June I went on a diet, called the Whole30. It was a 30-day detox program for me. It completely revamped the way I look at food and what I put into my body, and my metabolism has been boosted like nobodies business. I have a clean slate to work with, and as a result, I feel better, I perform better, I work myself better. 

In twelve weeks, I have lost a pant size and a half. (I’m not looking at weight, because I’ve clearly put on muscle. And I know that muscle is heavier than fat. So there really is no need to get on a scale. My pants don’t lie.) 

I have come so far in the past twelve weeks. I know I’m still not ready to climb that mountain. I won’t be ready until I set out at dawn on Hike Day and begin the climb. I’ve already signed up for a few more weeks with Trainer Tim to get me through to the beginning of September. Because these are the things I need to do to get myself ready for something that I really, truly want to accomplish for myself this year. 

No one ever said that doing all of this work was going to be easy. No one ever said that doing what needed to be done wasn’t going to hurt. I hurt daily. I find new ways to hurt. Daily. I fall down – constantly. I am always covered in bruises. 

And those are fresh from today. Trust me, that is going to be a lot worse tomorrow. But you know what, I’m probably going to be  lot worse off when I come down from Katahdin. Might as well get tougher skin now. 

But I’m not complaining about hard it is. When I fall down, I pick my ass right back up. And I try again. And when that doesn’t work out, I keep trying until I get it right. I don’t care how hard it is. I don’t care how much it hurts. I don’t care about how tired I am at the end of the day. Because I know that the ‘hard’ part of this isn’t going to be forever. Every day, it gets a little bit easier and a little bit more difficult. What I struggled with last week, I blow through this week. The thing is, once it gets ‘easy,’ there is something else thrown at me that is more difficult. Or new. There is no ‘routine’ to my workouts. It is progressively harder every day that goes by. So of course I’m going to be hurting at the end of the day. Of course it is going to continue to be hard. 

But I’m not complaining. I haven’t complained about the work load that my trainer gives me. Not once. And I feel that if I am not voicing any complaints, then neither should anyone else. Things I don’t need to hear:

 

"You don’t know what you’re doing."

"Your trainer doesn’t know what he’s talking about."

"WTF was your trainer thinking telling you to do something like that?"

"You need to scale it back, Drea." 

"You should rethink doing this. You’re doing too much." 

 

I don’t think any of that needs to be said. This is my trainer’s job. He’s not some dipshit I ran into while I was walking down the street. He has been professionally trained to be a professional trainer. He does know what he is talking about. I touch base with him every single day. I tell him what was easy, what was difficult, what I need improvement on. And he works with me. He does not ever ask me to do something that he thinks that I genuinely cannot do. And if I’m having a hard time with it, he modifies it into something easier, which is only a stepping stone for being able to do the harder exercise further down the line.

When I injured myself in the first week I was working with him, he changed his whole plan for me to accommodate the fact that I had a sprained sternum. When I injured myself, that was my fault – not his. He told me how to do the exercise properly, and I dug deeper because ‘I thought I could’. I fucked the timeline for building my upper body. But it was NDB. We did no upper body for almost three weeks. Because he wanted to make sure I was fully healed. 

But tell me again how he doesn’t know what he’s doing. Tell me again that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Tell me again how I’m doing too much, and pushing too hard for it to be considered healthy. I would really love to take the opportunity to ignore you. Because at the end of the day, as exhausted as I am, I still go to bed and have really athletic sex with my boyfriend. Because as tired as I may be I feel fucking fantastic about myself. 

In twelve weeks I have had not one person in my daily life support me in this program. Not my family, not my friends, not my boyfriend. But I have had every single person that I see on a regular basis tell me that I have been making a bad decision with trying to do this. Aside from proudly flaunting my major accomplishments – I PULLED A FUCKING JEEP WITH MY BARE HANDS, YO – and the occasional Facebook post about ‘Pumped it out today!’ or ‘Trainer Tim Tuesday, again!’ – I don’t talk about what I do with my trainer anymore. Because I know I can’t really talk about what I do without being ganged up on with, typically, an

y combination of the above listed negative comments. If you don’t want to discuss what I’m doing in a polite manner, then please don’t try to discuss it at all. Because you have no idea how hard it is to bring myself back up from that veritable pit of negativity.  (Ain’t nobody got time for that!)

What I’m doing with my time, money, and body is nobodies concern or business by my own.

First thing Sam did when he got home was walk into the room, take a look at my legs, and then proceed to yell at me for ‘being stupid enough to actually do every thing that my trainer tells me to.’ That I need to ‘know my limits,’ and ‘That guy is a jackass!’ You know what. Doing raised plank side crunches on a swing? Not the worst part of my day. 

Want to know what that was? I had to face my fear of falling – while having a full on anxiety attack – while traversing the fucking monkey bars. Shimmying across the top of the bars from one side to the other with a six an a half foot drop into a really messy mud puddle underneath was without a doubt THE HARDEST THING my trainer has ever asked me to do. He had to talk me down from the playscape when I was finished. But guess what guys: I FUCKING DID IT. I was terrified. I had tunnel vision. And I couldn’t breathe. I was right back up on Katahdin, sliding down that slope towards that sheer drop all over again. But you know what – That’s okay. I got across. I did it. And now I know that’s something to work on. Glad I found out how bad THAT WAS before I got up on the fucking mountain again. 

Don’t look at my bruises and failures and tell me that these are things that I shouldn’t be doing. Look at my accomplishments and remind me of how far I’ve come. If you’re not going to do that – and that goes for Sam as well as anyone else in my life – then I don’t want to hear it. There is no polite way to say that. 

 

 

 

 

That was twelve weeks of frustration that just came spilling out because Sam was dumb enough to break the dam after I had a really difficult day. 

 

…..I feel better though. 

ALW