Boot Camp Day 3

When I think of some of the happiest moments in my life, it usually involves sweat. Whether it was finishing Ironman, training with my pals in the Arizona summer, hell, clearing a building without being shot, blown up or falling over a trip wire, all included a great deal of sweat.

I knew on Monday that by today I would not look like I did or feel like I did when I toed the line in Florida. C'mon thats fantasy. But I fell in love again with the idea that days upon days of proper training I would bring that back. And in reality I shouldn't feel like that right now, I deserved a break after 500 days of goal setting.

We all know that if we ate better and trained a little bit more that we would start looking the way we want to. However we must acknowledge and dismiss the myth that running around the block a few times and doing some push ups and sit ups will not get us where we want to go. It simply is not true.

Excluding my fitness levels in the Infantry which worked for a different skill set, Ironman Day is the most fit I have been in my life, but it wasn't the best looking physically that I have ever been. When I was training for bodybuilding shows and had single digit bodyfat, I looked the best I have ever looked but felt my worst health wise the closer I got to the show.

Its this balance we have between wanting to look and feel the way we did in high school, (that old cliche') but then realizing that you probably weren't really in that great a shape then either, just a thinner version of yourself now. We can never please our inner self. Although there are some of us, maybe many we read this post how weigh less and look better than they did in high school or on their wedding day. I can claim both and I am still uncomfortable with myself.

While you read this today I am vacation. Vacation for me is not sitting on the beach and drinking silly concoctions through a straw or curling up with a good book, though both are fabulous activities, especially the reading. Vacation for me is pushing my physical limits, sweating out the inner turmoil that I have about my 'weakness' of mind and body. A self-conflagration. Ironman was a vacation. My week long backpacking trip in Yosemite last year was vacation.

Mistress and I went to an all-inclusive spa resort in Mexico a few years back; as part of this package all food and alcohol was free and we each had 90 minute massages every other day and facials and mani/ pedi's (I traded those in for other services BTW) on the others. Instead of drowning myself in rum at the pool for hours at a time, I was running and crawling through the jungle along pig trails burning off the filet mignon and champagne we had for dinner the night before. I found a challenging obstacle course and flung my body upon its wooden structures for hours at a time sometimes being pulled from the course by Mistress because I was late for dinner,arriving in a sweaty dress shirt and dirt stained khakis because I was already dressed for dinner and wanted to get in a few runs before I relaxed for the night.

Sweat for me is survival. Survival OF something and TILL something.
Its also a forge. Sweat is the cost the body pays for something special it creates.
Sweat for me is life.