With just a cursory glance at my blog, you can probably tell that I am a pretty active person. Well, that might be an understatement, but truly, I have love sports, being physical, lifting weights, and pretty much being a feral wild haired creature for most of my days. It was not uncommon for me to spend hours training for sports and weight lifting at school only to come home and split firewood, play baseball for hours, or run like a heathen. I like to move.
However, in the last couple years I have noticed something. While I can still move like my 18 year old self, my 38 year old self sometimes squawks a bit in reply. Like my knees deliver a screeching oratory of agony when I jump off of a horse after a twenty mile ride or my flintlocks don't want to engage the morning after a scintillating volleyball match. What the heck?
After a bit of reflection I realized that my little form was, gasp, aging! Now, I am not one to get too overly fussy about a thing that cannot be stopped or controlled, but dangit, I still want to play kickball like an unruly Neanderthal from time to time. It was then that I realized I better start training a bit to strengthen and retain muscles, flexibility, and joint movement for such things.
I am far too awkward (and frugal) to hang with the Crossfit crowd (although I admire their intensity, I love to work myself until almost tears and muscle failure), but honestly I would want to wear riggin clothes or a set of form fitting purple coveralls to Crossfit and that yearning would detract from why the heck I was there. As fortune would have it, my neighbor informed me that the 24 hour gym that we have in our small town had a lady who was doing hour long weight training classes for $5. SOLD!
Little did I know that these classes weren't your standard weight lifting sessions, rather they were a combination of strength training and HIIT. Sometimes we use free weights, sometimes we use barbells, there always seems to be some form of torture on an exercise ball, and hello Russian twists. I can honestly say that there were times in the beginning that I woke up the next day and wanted to die, as every muscle group was singing a sore opera.
I faithfully went and still go to weight lifting class, and then Kelly, my trainer, suggested that I should try the cardio kickboxing class. Punching and kicking things will always appeal to me, so I totally appeared at that class as well, I mean, who could dislike doing sequences of moves with names like The Terminator and Jackie Chan? That kickboxing class is my favorite.
Let me tell you what I miss though. I miss being able to torment my form with all manner of muscle and cardiovascular work and then go hard for hours, subsist on little sleep and/or food, and then hit it again the next day. Those days have fled I am afraid. Sure, I can go hard still, in fact I can still lift and hit it like my 18 year old self, it's just the recovery that gets me. I get tired now. There, I said it. I also get more sore, for longer. I do not like these things.
Like right now, after spending an hour doing an insane amount of squats and planks and push ups, I find that I really would like to just go take a nap instead of doing the myriad of chores that are taunting me. I mean, I am eating zoodle Lo mein stir fry instead of traditional wheat noodles, shouldn't I be rewarded with a nap for being good? Bueller?
Life is just so full of so many things, especially cool things that I want to do besides the to dos that I have to do. I am finding it difficult here lately to ration my energy so that I can actually have the energy to do the fun things after I finish with my responsible, productive adult things. Is that the negative about aging? Do any of you all struggle with that?
One thing for sure though, I will keep getting my butt kicked by my trainer, because after spending two decades mired in the misery and clutches of a horrid, energy zapping auto-immune disease, I never want to go back. That, and I like it when she looks at me and says, "Kat, I think you can do more than that." Why yes, yes I can!
And as most of the time, all of the images in this post were taken on the author's probably needs to be disinfected after being used as a timer on the gym floor iPhone.
