I was waiting for this week. I knew it was coming. And yet it still caught me off guard. The perfect storm of my literal weakness colliding with the mental weakness of this no longer being a fun, “new” experience hit me like a tornado, spinning cows and all. To put it succinctly, this week was rough!
To start things off, I really wasn’t feeling that hot on Monday. I had had a few quiet hours to myself Monday afternoon before boot camp and I decided to use them lazily, which made me extremely cranky and tired and irritable by the time 6PM rolled around. Not to mention that Jordan purposefully created this week a little differently for us. Up until this week, our drills have been pretty heavy on the cardio side of life. This is my sweet spot. Between a brief interlude with running and my Nike Training Club, I can handle a good cardio workout. I will complain and moan but I have the mental game to know that I can go one more mile, do one more burpee, and jump one more time to reach my goal. This week the only “real” cardio we did was our run around the track in between sets and the thump thump thumping of our hearts as we attempted not to fall flat on our faces. This week was aimed at strength and strength alone. You can read Jordan’s account of this week to see the valid reasons why she chose to put us thru this torture.
Now, I know that I do not possess a body builder’s physique but for crying out loud, I thought I had a little more strength than those kittens you see on posters where they are clinging to a hammock type net. But no, apparently I am a dangling kitten. This made Monday’s workout all that much more miserable. Everyone knows that any form of exercise is 90% mental and my mental game on Monday was shot. I whimpered and growled through our workout and got into my car feeling like I was back at square one and had made absolutely no progress in our 4 weeks together at all. In fact, I felt better after our very first workout ever than I did after Monday’s workout. So I did what any self-respecting failure does, I got a huge hamburger and fries with my husband that night and told him I could care less about how awful I had performed.
But alas, this was not true. Starting on Tuesday I could feel the dread already rising in me when I thought about boot camp the next afternoon. I tried pumping myself up, I talked to Jordan about it, I even mentally envisioned myself performing the drills and kicking butt at it. And Wednesday was….better. Not great but not as soul sucking awful as Monday. I even managed to get my best time ever around the track (see, cardio all day long, suckas!) but I still didn’t feel satisfied. I was still having to do all of the drills using modifications. I was still tired and sore but in all the wrong places. My form was still sloppy and I was still beating myself up when I got back into my car at the end.
So that brings us to this morning. Dark and early at 7AM. It was 48 degrees outside. I know some of you live in climates where that temperature is the norm and you are rolling your eyes at me and my cold weather intolerance but working out in 48 degrees, when you have 4 layers on, and are alternating between a rapid boil and a bracing breeze is brutal on the body…especially for us Floridians. We know how to sweat but don’t make us shiver. We whine a lot. Because of the cold, we were all eager to begin so after a quick warm up to get the blood flowing, we got right into it. And it hurt. And it was hard. And I wanted it to be over. But it wasn’t near the torturous experience I had had on Monday. And it wasn’t as depressing as it was on Wednesday. My little kitten muscles were determined to at least reach those of a teenaged cat by the end of the morning. And I felt pretty dang good when I climbed back into the car an hour later. My form, though miles from perfect, wasn’t quite as sloppy. The muscles that ached were the RIGHT muscles. And I held my head a little bit higher on my drive home this morning, knowing that I had begun to conquer what I thought was unconquerable. My mental game is on its way back! (Probably just in time for Jordan to knock it back out of the park next week but whatever!)
itaintallrainbows 