Since starting a five-day-a-week workout routine that necessitates getting out of bed at the unseemly hour of 5:30 a.m. and stumbling, bleary and dejected, to the gym, I've learned some things. Epiphanies that occur on the running track or while hustling up and down the arena steps are special things, ranging from the truly profound to the slightly hysterical.
I've wondered about the mental well-being of gerbils and hamsters who spend endless hours on their wheels, running and running without getting anywhere at all and compared it to the despair I feel as I make endless laps around the walking track. Surely those little rodents must find some sense of satisfaction in their toils, equal or greater to the satisfaction I find having survived yet another bout of laps in the hazy, depressing darkness around the fieldhouse.
I don't know. In the end, the rodent ends up staggering off the wheel right back where it was before — in a little cage filled with wood shavings and a water bottle. Doesn't stop the creature from trying, though, and maybe that's what my life has become -- an eternal rat race.
There are other thoughts, though, other flashes of accomplishment and triumph over little things, like holding a plank position for longer than seven seconds, like making it to the finish line without keeling over and begging for mercy.
There are sadder realizations that cannot be denied, like the fact that crab walks, which delighted me for hours on end as a child, scuttling through the halls of my house and hills surrounding it, have become a new sort of torture I never could have suspected.
There was also the worrying moment when, upon flopping face down on a mat with trembling arms and abs, I realized that no delicious, calorie-laden food ever tasted good enough to deserve this pain. In a year dedicated to personal growth (my New Years Resolution), I'm not sure if that is a step forward or not, because the days can get pretty hungry without calories.
So now, with pain in muscles I did not know I had and one week into a five-week workout journey, I'm filled with a mingled sense of despair and giddy triumph.
I haven't given up. I can do more push-ups now than I could a week ago. The stairs at the R.J. Lalonde Arena have taken on a whole new painful meaning.
But I've survived.
It's more than I can say for the poor gerbil I had in junior high.
