Dealing With Soreness, and Cake

Something that it seems nobody really talks about that much when talking about fitness and exercise is soreness. The fact is, there is quite a lot of pain involved in getting healthy, relatively speaking. That is perfectly normal, and it will not kill you.

Now as you continue to work your muscles, your body adapts. You will become more efficient at recovery. But there have been many nights that I wake up and am shocked at how hard it is to waddle to the bathroom because of the squats, lunges, box jumps, or whatever I did the day before, or even two days before! Climbing up the stairs to get into bed can feel more like scaling Mount Everest, and sitting down, particularly the descent, whew!

I have a motto, one of many, but this one I made up all on my own as best as I can remember. It is, "Life is hard, once you realize that, everything else gets easier." Basically, there is a corner that every person can choose to round. It is when you look around and notice that there is not a single person born into this world that escapes pain. We convince ourselves that ours is unique, somehow worse than other's, or that nobody would understand if they only knew how bad we really had it, but that is a bunch of bull. You are not alone in your pain. And you can withstand far more than you think.

So I have taken a lot of Ibuprofen in my life. Lately I have been going for aspirin instead because Evan, one of my Crossfit trainers, made the point that the very inflammation that Ibuprofen treats is important to building stronger muscles. I'm really simplifying what he actually said, but I think that is the long and short of it. I'm not saying you should pop a pill every time you have a little ache, I'm just sayin' sometimes you've gotta have something.

So if you want to see your body change, don't kid yourself. There is no getting around the soreness and pain. But I believe it is worth it. To me it is like this; do I want to suffer a bit now on my terms, or have my body break down on me because of under use and suffer later? I'll take my medicine now, thank you. When I can do something about it. I know there are no guarantees, but I'm putting my money on working hard for a strong, healthy body now rather than waiting to see what will become of my "temple" by coasting along.

Yea, I just ate a piece of cake. But I have not had dessert all weekend, and this thing has been sitting in there since Amanda made it on Thursday. I had some cake with ice cream. You just can't have it ALL the time. Make it the exception and not the rule. I'm not saying it will be easy, I am saying that it can be done.

I have heard that even a bad picture is better than no picture, so there you go. There is a picture with this post.