I've got a lot of things to learn...again

Monday. Enough said.

Today I got up and did my 30 minute metabolism boosting workout before I went into the clinic. Not bad. The worst thing I can say about it is that I find it boring. I need distractions to get through it. I find myself counting the minutes. Do you know how long a minute takes to pass when you're actually watching the seconds tick off?

It takes exactly a minute. Seems longer. Much longer.

I don't like to exercise, folks. I know many of you reading will be quite surprised by this confession but it's true. I really do not like it at all. It is uncomfortable and tiring. It hurts. It's sweaty and kinda gross. As previously mentioned, it can be tedious and boring. An hour is a mind-numbingly long time to spend on the treadmill.

It makes me feel self-conscious. Even when no one else is in the room. It's like I imagine watching myself and I think, "Good gawd, stop. You're embarrassing yourself. No. Seriously. Stop doing that." And then I close my own eyes.

Chris and Steve told me today that they always get odd looks at the gym when they work out because they do exercises no one else does. Chris does bear crawls and the other guys working on chest and biceps look at him strangely, he reports. Something tells me they aren't looking at him and thinking he doesn't know what he's doing. Steve reports that he thinks he's one of the smaller guys at his gym and people always give him odd looks when he's working out.

Newsflash. No one is looking at either Steve or Chris at the gym and thinking, "Man, that guy is really out of shape. Look at the flab on him. What the heck does he think he's doing?"

For me, it's different. I move in one direction and a substantial part of me has been known to move in another. My daughter and I tried to do jumping jacks this morning. Let's just say there wasn't a lot of jumping, quite a bit of jack. My body has forgotten how to do a lot of things.

Chris is always trying to get me to jump. Vertical jumping is part of the testing we do at the clinic. I say this to you in all seriousness, the first time he asked me to do it, I had not jumped in the air in more than 20 years. I looked at him and said, "You want me to jump? Off the ground?"

On my first attempt my brain could not tell my muscles how to do it. Whatever neural connections were meant to fire when my brain said, "Ok, leg muscles, jump!", they didn't. My legs stayed exactly where they were, planted on the ground, "Huh?"

The trainers have me do exercises that scare me sometimes. I'm not talking I-might-catch-a-glimpse-of-myself-in-the-mirror scared. I mean my body spent a lot of years not jumping, not twisting and not running. For a reason. When you are as heavy as I was, you learn that something like hopping over a child's toy on your living room floor can result in a very painful twisted knee. Or blowing it out altogether. Wiping out on a slippery floor or a patch of ice can result in death. I became very aware of the risks involved in moving my extremely overweight body from point A to point B and at no time did I think about taking the hop, skip and a jump method of travel.

My brain sometimes forgets that I don't weigh 400 pounds anymore. When I work out with the trainers there are times when my brain receives the instruction but fails to process the request. So in addition to exercise being all the other things I mentioned, sometimes it's stressful for me too. I have had to relearn how to move.

The trainers are extremely good at what they do. They both hold masters degrees in exercise physiology. Chris watches me like a hawk. He catches me out of the corner of his eye and barks daily, "Don't lock your knees!" from across the clinic while setting up my next exercise. They are on me about form all the time and to date I have never suffered an injury from working out with them. I don't feel like I'm in danger. I just feel scared. I guess it's another reason I don't like exercise.

Last week I said that sometimes you don't know what you can do, until you do it. Chris was happy to quote me on that today when he was having me do squats with free weights (and I was fantasizing about hanging him out the window of a ten story building by his shoe strings).

I realize now that sometimes I have to relearn how to do something before I can surprise myself by doing it. It's like being in remedial phy-ed. At the age of 41. Nothing slow to develop about that.

When I started this whole thing, it was a "diet". I had no idea what an exploration in self-discovery it would be as well.

Another day, another pound, another mental block...down.

Ok, almost down.

Ok, I'm working on it.