The post below is a complement to what I share in the video. To fully understand it, it will help to watch or listen to the video.
The Week in Review
This week ran the emotional gamut - from proud and gratified after Monday’s workout, to miserable after crashing on Tuesday, to resigned after feeling like my body wasn’t going to rebound, then back to gratified after coming out of the mire (and realizing how much healing had happened as a result of doing the workout and how much I had learned from this experience).
Emotions Were the Path
One thing I didn’t say in the video is that, after the crash, a whole lot of emotional wounds surfaced and, after ignoring what was coming up for a day or even two, I finally realized that I needed to focus in on the emotions and process them. It was miserable and unpleasant but worth it.
Other Reasons My Body May Have Crashed
As I was processing the emotions that came up, it occurred to me that part of what may have had me physically down and out was an emotional layer in need of midwifing. Another part might have been a detox reaction. I hadn’t thought of that possibility until now. A couple of weeks ago, I changed up my diet - I began eating a lot more fruit and a lot less almond yogurt. It seems reasonable that the change could have spurred a detox reaction which, in turn, could explain the fatigue and the emotional layers surfacing. Combined with the temperture drop, that could have knocked me down for the count.
Workout Recap
As I write this post, my body continues to feel better. I did my energy routine yesterday and added in the full-body joint mobility routine I do. Both went fine. I’ll keep things easy today and am planning to do a strength workout tomorrow, though I won’t know until I get there exactly what I’ll do.
The Workout that Crashed Me
Below is the workout I did on Monday that sent me over the edge. In my last post, I explained what I’m intending to address by doing these exercises:
3 x 60 second holds each of the following:
Knee side planks
L-Sit lean backs
Tall kneeling good mornings
Sit up lean backs
Dead bug leg extensions
3 x 30 second holds each of the following:
Prone leg raises
Prone torso raises
Benefits of These Exercises
Since I began doing these exercises, I have felt much stronger. I can stand and do leg circles for my joint mobility routine, for example, without having to take breaks because of hip fatigue and discomfort. Also, the chronic tightness I have had on the right side of my body has begun to alleviate. With my body rebounding as it is, I feel so much better. Not only will I not lose the ground I’ve made, my body will be able to continue to improve on these fronts.
Sisyphus
I chose the image of Sisyphus for the video thumb because it felt resonant with what I learned this past week.
In Greek mythology, Sisyphus is sentenced by the gods to roll a boulder up a hill. After laboring up most of the hill, just when he thinks he’s done, the boulder rolls back down to the bottom and he has to start all over again. Thus, he never completes the task and has to endlessly dig deep to keep pushing the boulder up the hill.
Different people interpret this story in different ways. In the video, I talk about an unconscious need I had to prove to myself that I could dig deep and push hard when the going got tough. When I was thinking about this need, which I might call an unconscious driver in me, the image of Sisyphus came to mind.
To me, in this circumstance, the image represents the futility of such effort (called going to the well in running circles) in our training. We do not need to prove our metal to ourselves or anyone else in our workouts. If we approach our workouts in this way, all we do is burn ourselves out and compromise our ability to dig deep and push hard when we need it. We also fail to learn the difference between working hard and working easy and thus fail to learn the art and craft of training and making consistent progress over time.
Food for thought: Everything in life is an art and a craft. That means that everything is about learning the skills of our craft so we can use our talent to create art. Training is no different. When we learn the craft of training - when to work, when to rest, what to do for each, and how to provide for our bodies - our physical health becomes our art.
Grit - digging deep, going to the well - is one part of the training path. If we apply it judiciously throughout our training lives, whether in races or in intelligently planned workouts at key points in our training cycle, we can satisfy a deep desire to see just what we are made of and what we can do. But we can do so without compromising our health, our progress, and our ability to tap into this deep well in key, strategic moments.
In my earlier training days, I was never able to build a developmentally essential sense of inner security and trust in myself around this matter of grit and going to the well. The reason, I believe now in hindsight, is that I never learned the craft of training, instead always ricocheting between undertraining (taking summers off1) and overtraining (baptism by fire each time the fall rolled around). Because I didn’t train in the summers (or trained sporadically and ineffectively2), I never built up a base that would allow me to continue to improve, so I was always (over)training beyond my unchanged edge year after year.
Image Credit
Mentioned in the Video
In the video part of this post, I mentioned my post on the Aries Full Moon that I published on my other Substack, Astrology Journal. That post is called, Healing the Divide: The Path to 'I Am' Beyond Good and Evil. If you’d like to check it out, you can find it by clicking on the link.
Updates
October 20, 2024
I made some minor edits to convey more accurately what I was trying to say.
I added a long-ish footnote to clarify my relationship with training when younger.
A Gentle Reminder: On the Nature of this Content
While I am certified as a personal trainer (certified in 2011), I have never worked in the field and, other than attending a weekend workshop learning about the foundations of the Z-Health system, I have not pursued formal continuing education due to illness. Therefore, what I share in my videos and other posts about my personal journey, choices, and insights is not meant to constitute professional advice or training guidance. I am sharing my experiences purely as an individual on a personal journey.
While I will do my best to explain what I’m doing, each person is unique, and what is right for you will depend on your specific situation, so please use your best judgment if you decide to try anything I share. As needed, consult with qualified professionals - such as doctors, physical therapists, certified personal trainers currently working in the field, running coaches, nutritionists, etc. - who can work with you directly to help you reach your goals given your specific circumstances.
That statement is generally true. But it is also true that I would occasionally go out and kill myself on a 2-mile run or hill workout to make up for not training every day. That was the result of me not really understanding what I needed to do but also sensing I should be doing something. I even felt guilty about not running though I don’t remember anyone telling me I should be doing it. (Coaches were not allowed to coach athletes in the off-season.) So a more accuate statement might be that I ran sporadically in the summer, doing intense workouts here and there in an attempt to make up for missed days. It didn’t work, of course. By focusing on intense work, I was burning myself out and I was not doing what I needed to be doing, which was logging consistent, long slow miles to build up an endurance base. At the time, I didn’t understand the purpose of building an aerobic base beyond building some baseline stamina so I could run a certain distance without fatiguing.
See footnote 1.
A Surprisingly Good Week Despite Setback