Pushing through

It's time to face the facts and admit that I feel overloaded with everything on my plate right now. There's a lot to get done and a shrinking supply of time to do it. How am I going to pull it all off? One way or another I will--it's not a question of if but when--but that mountain in need of climbing keeps looking steeper.

I'm going to try to apply a lesson from my exercise yesterday and today to help me see everything through. Yesterday I got on the treadmill and set it at the four miles per hour rate that I've been using. Typically my calves take awhile to loosen up, but I was more than a mile in and really feeling the pain. I was struggling to keep up and finally took it down to 3.8 mph because I could tell that 4 mph was more than I could handle at the moment.

Even this slightly reduced speed was a challenge. My legs continued to hurt, but I kept going. I felt like I needed to push through. Yes, there had been easier workouts, but this one was challenging me to summon the willpower and toughness for those days when I'm struggling. I'll be all the better for gutting it out.

The thing is, I never hit a point when I felt good. It was a tough slog of a workout, and I occasionally bargained with myself that I'd stop after 40 or 45 minutes. Somehow I made it through the full hour, but did I ever hurt. Plus, I zonked out around 8:30 p.m. and woke up after 10. I "won" by completing the workout, but it exacted a toll.

I decided to give it a try again today. I can't explain it, but I felt really good and had maybe my easiest sixty minutes of exercise this year. (Well, that's excluding the interruptions by accidentally knocking my iPod onto the treadmill and having a fire alarm go off halfway through.) I was tempted to keep on going after time was up because I was killing it.

Did slugging my way through the difficulties of Monday provide me with additional endurance to succeed on Tuesday? Maybe, maybe not. Still, the idea of pushing through the resistance and knowing that it will pay off in the long run certainly seems like something applicable out of all this. At least that's what I'm telling myself to get through it.