pain is not weakness leaving the body, pain is a build up of lactic acid in your muscles that comes from pushing yourself in exercise.
if you tell your trainer this when he says “push through, pain is weakness leaving the body” it will most likely get a laugh. it did for me.
i am sore pretty much all the time, muscle wise. not injury wise. workout with trainer, run, workout with trainer, run, go to the gym, long run (15 - 20 miles right now for marathon training).
weakness for me is mental. my body can do way more than i push it to. but it tells my mind to stop and my mind listens. my mind has to be stronger than my body.
running hills sprints liked to killed me. all kinds of torture. we were at our last set. 10 sprint repeats. the hill was probably 25 yards long and pretty steep. i stood at the bottom waiting to catch my breath and start back up. 10 more times. in my head i was saying (gasping, because i was so worn out that even the voice in my head was gasping due to limited oxygen) "i can't do it. i can't do it." i said this for the first 5 times i sprinted up the hill.
5 left to go and i'm continuing to say to myself "i can't do this". it must've shown on my face. at the bottom of the hill steve looked at me and said, "you can do it, pain is temporary". not weakness, temporary. i sprinted (sprint is the correct term because of the effort expended, not the speed achieved) the last five simply because i knew when i was done it wouldn't hurt anymore. i could've quit, but that pain? the pain of quitting? hurts worse.
discipline. digging deep to do the hard things. whether physical, mental, spiritual or emotional.
pushing through the pain to strength. doing it even when your own voice is telling you you can't.
when i was at mile 23 of a 22 mile run last friday night/saturday morning, i called steve and simply said "i'm lost". i can't begin to list all the emotions i was feeling. but i realized two days later that the one thing that i didn't feel was like quitting. i told the race director when steve gave him the phone so he could tell me where i was that i didn't run all night to not get a finish.
two things i had never had, a dnf (did not finish) and last place. i got one of them, i was last place. or 11th place, that sounds better. and i always thought that would hurt. but it doesn't. i finished. and i ran harder and faster the last 6 miles of that race than i did any of the first 19. pain is not weakness. pain is temporary, in this case, 4 days temporary...
that mindset that pushes, that refuses to give up, that won't quit, that hopes?
it's not about running. it's about life.
it helps with the running. but that feeling of "i can do this", that something better is at the end of this trial (trail? lol), this obstacle? it's what keeps me going, wandering through life.
and when you have pushed through the pain to the reward, the pain truly is temporary.
the reward saturday morning was a finish.
the reward in other areas? too many to list.
i've been blessed.
No comments:
Post a Comment