And Yet Another Lesson Learned

I wasn’t sporty as a kid, unless you count baton.

Or tap dancing

There was one brief foray into gymnastics.

But that ended after a disasterous vault where my toes hit the vault and I landed face first on the mats below.  Also, in the picture above, I think I was disqualified for having my socks pulled too high.

The point is, I didn’t get into any sort of sport until I was 41 so I’m a little slow on the uptake sometimes.

My light bulb moment came after watching the Olympics these past two weeks and listening to interviews with the athletes and how they just “run through the pain” or “kayak through the pain” or “swim through the pain.”  They talked about the pain of grueling workouts, the mental pain, the pain after the grueling workouts. Basically they live in pain.

Then after Wednesday night’s dryland training, it finally sunk in that it’s always going to hurt. I mean, not hurt-hurt like excruciating pain where your body is trying to tell you you’re going to cause permanent damage if you keep going, but hurt that you need to get past mentally. Or as E. put it before we did our run, “You need to keep running no matter what. Unless it’s dragging, bending the wrong way or spraying liquid, you shouldn’t stop.”  This made me burst out laughing, although the laughing stopped when I was running and wanted to walk but couldn’t because we have to do a minute of planks each time we stop.

The lesson in this is that there will always be hurt.

I didn’t realize that before. I assumed because I had never speed skated my body wasn’t used to working so hard and it hurt for me but everyone else was A-okay. That all the other speed skaters didn’t have burning legs because they had been doing it for such a long time.

I’m not gonna lie. Whenever I used to work out, I would stop when it started to get uncomfortable for me. The one main thing dryland training has taught me this summer is that my body is capable of way more than I gave it credit for. That I need to push myself. And I need accept that I will always feel some sort of hurt, whether it’s burning legs or wanting to cough up a lung, because it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.

Basically I need to focus just as much on my mental ability as my physical ability.

I’m slow but eventually I get it.

Ta da!

*curtsies*

p.s. My very sporty husband who is a natural athlete and is good at any sport he tries is probably reading this right now wondering how we ended up together.

p.p.s. Hi Hon! It’s called the power of opposites!  Two people who are completely different yet attracted to each other.  It’s top-posites!

p.p.p.s. It was pointed out by E. that the saying is actually:  “Unless it is broken, pointing the wrong way, or leaking, you are not allowed to stop” which proves the theory that anything having to do with sports and athleticism, including sayings, I will get wrong.

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