Perspective...

I wake up this morning incredibly sore, especially my inner and outer thighs. I know yesterday was my leg day but this isn't usually how I feel when I wake up. I'll take that as an encouragement that I'm doing something right. Oddly enough, soreness is encouragement. Though please don't misunderstand me and think that I'm saying soreness is pleasant. It is far from pleasant. My entire day is spent hobbling from location to location and trying to move as little as possible because my muscles hurt so bad.

By the time 6:00 rolls around and Fit Andrew and I leave for the gym, my muscles have loosened up and it doesn't take too much effort to walk. Though the stairs at the gym still give me a bit of a workout. The thing I'm dreading the most is the warm up. The cross trainer is a terror on your legs, in terms of the burning and working of muscles. And on sore muscles? I can only imagine what that's like and it looks something like the first twenty minutes of Saving Private Ryan (cheesy joke alert post cheesy joke).

I have to start out slow, unfortunately. Though, truth be told, that's the whole point of a warm up. You gradually work up to where you need to be for the subsequent workout (boy I sound like a fitness genius right now). It is slower than usual, however; a sign of my fatigue. I get through two songs that puts my warm up right at eight minutes. After a quick wipe down of the machine, WHICH EVERYONE SHOULD DO, I run into Justin on his way to retrieve me.

We start with pull downs, tricep pushes and one minute hovers. The hovers are really killing me, today. My abs are sore and I start to feel like I'm losing control of my muscles. That proves that they work. If you ever doubted, shame on you. You should have to do hovers as a punishment.

Here's my one complaint about weight lifting: The whole business of have to consciously use the muscles you're supposed to use is bogus. The moves should just automatically work the correct muscles. I don't like it when Justin has to tell me to be sure to pull my shoulder blades together as I do the pull downs. Shouldn't that just be what happens? I think it should.

We move on to a machine in the cardio room and try to do another pull down exercise, but I am too tall. I had no idea you could be too tall to do an exercise. But I guess at six foot four, it really is quite possible. So instead I have to do a half squat row. Squats are not nice to do when your quads are in pain to begin with. It is especially not nice when you have to maintain a half squat while doing a row. My back feels tight, my legs hurt, my neck starts to get a little sore, it's a generally awful experience. But I have been doing a great job, if I do say so myself, of not voicing those complaints during the training session. Apart from the intial "you're awful", "I hate you", or, "you're so mean."

We end with single tricep pushes (I guess it's an arm heavy day) and Justin then makes me go to a half hour CX Works class. This class is an intense half hour of strength exercise and core exercise and squatting and lunging and planking and hovering and it's awful and wonderful all at the same time. When you do this class it is very apparent from minute one that you are working your muscles. Basically it extended my personal training session by half an hour and amped up the intensity by about fifty. Simply because it's so fast paced.

It really does feel good to be getting back into the habit of making it to the gym. We'll see if I say the same thing tomorrow, considering I will yet again be to the gym at 6:00am, but I have a feeling that I will. It just feels good to know that I'm doing something that's good for me, regardless of how I feel in the moment. That's why I hope that Justin or Kiki or any other instructor doesn't only take my 'during' reaction as how I really feel. I love it all.