It Never Fails!

No sooner do I make a declaration for my handful of readers all the world to see,  but I suffer some sort of set back.  I was pretty happy with the way things turned out on Monday.  Half an hour at the gym in the morning, two thirds of that time  spent running and not walking.  Follow that up with my usual hour long session  with the personal trainer in the evening and I was doing pretty well.

Except, my session on Monday night didn’t go all that well.  My ham strings were bothering me again and that was causing pain in my knees that isn’t especially helpful when the trainer wants you to jump and step a lot.  And then, as if that  weren’t enough, my left shoulder basically shut down on me.  He had me doing  lateral shoulder presses, and chest presses and chest flies and at some point in the early stages of that my left arm stopped working.  I could complete the motion with my right arm with relative ease (the farther I got into the set the more fatigue  set in and I struggled, but I finished) but my left arm couldn’t get beyond the  halfway point.

My trainer, Tawaiin (pronounced Tuh-wahn) didn’t seem particularly concerned  about what was happening but did seem to recognize that it wasn’t the kind of  thing we could just push through.  More than once he reduced the number of reps or told me to stop before we were finished.

One of the reasons I’ve pushed myself to find the funding for the trainer is that I  need the accountability and the demand that he places on me.  Without someone holding me accountable for finishing each set, I would stop as soon as it became a struggle, thinking that was good enough and all I could do.  Tawaiin has  consistently held me accountable to do all of the reps and finish the sets and get  the most out of my work outs.  And I have, proving that, yeah, it sucks, but I can do it.  Monday was my fifteenth session with him and in that time he’s seen me do everything he’s asked me to do.  He’s seen me make an effort to do whatever he asks of me, even when I feel like I can’t do it and he’s seen me push myself to complete it all.  So when I simply could not make my arm move any farther than it had already he knew it wasn’t going to happen.  Still, I was frustrated. By the time I got home, took a shower, heated and ate dinner and ironed two sets of clothes for work, my legs were hurting immensely.  I finished ironing at 10:00, put  everything away and sat down to finish whatever TV show I was watching (Chuck?) and give the cat the requisite lap time he’d been waiting so impatiently for.

I made it to bed, watched a half hour show on Tivo and rolled over to go to sleep by 11:00, but getting up Tuesday morning was much more difficult.  I hadn’t taken any measures to remedy my leg pain, thinking that sleep and lack of use would take care of things.  When my alarms went off in the morning, I could barely make it  across the room to turn them off, let alone go to the gym and run.  I set the alarms for a late time and went back to bed.  I had every intention of going to Yoga on Tuesday night, but by the end of the day I realized I was just too sore and tired  (and a little scared of further aggravation) to make it after all.  I wimped out, went home and rested but not before making lunches for the next two days.

Last night, I was in bed by 10:20, watched the inside of my eyelids a re-run of Modern Family and went to sleep.  I wore a knee brace all night which seemed to help this morning.  When the alarms went off, I did snooze them (twice) but got up  after that.  It was a little slower going than it was on Monday, but I made it to the  gym a few minutes after 7:00.  There were significantly more people at that time, but not so many that they got in my way.  I was only planning for 30 minutes again and I managed to run for twelve minutes of that time.  Ultimately, I had to slow down and walk again.  My knees were OK, and I was still breathing steadily not  gasping for air but my shins and ankles were hurting and I had to drop down to walking again.  No cheesy “in the zone” moments for me today. 🙂

I guess the lesson to take away from all this, is exactly what I said in Monday’s post:

“…I’m not perfect and sometimes I fail to follow through on my plans.  I take comfort in the fact that when that happens, I’m not a failure, I’m not a loser, I’ve got nothing to be upset about, I’m simply human and just like everyone else.  What I’m going to tell you is that I won’t get up at 5:30 every single morning to go the gym.  Sometimes I’ll take a break…”

What’s important is that I “got back on the horse” as they say.  I got up this morning and got my butt to the gym.  It was tough.  Definitely not as smooth as I would like it to be, but hey, this is the first week and after a lifetime of being a night person and not a morning person.  Progress is progress…