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Always start the day with Ice Cube.
This morning my skinniest pants were a little tight.

Oh, and I ran 6 miles before 8 in the morning. This helped me immensely, because I woke up somewhat anxious, but I sure didn’t feel it when I was finished, not after sweating for laps and listening to the National on my iFuck thing. And then later ran another mile plus did push ups and squats and pull ups and stuff with a hot young girl who is a friend of mine.

We borrowed a roto-tiller thing that looked like a giant ground-churning grasshopper, and had to schlepp that thing back to the tool lending library, so I hopped onto the bed of the pickup truck, grabbed the handles, and deadlifted it into the truck. When some 50 pound boxes of rubber mats were delivered, we hauled them through the yard and into our storage. I was not sore from that, and it did not stump me, and we did not have to call the neighbor guys to help.

Also, I got to train one of my favorite people, and tried to remind her that injuries heal, because I’ve had them and they’ve gotten better. For once my kid and I made it to the bus stop on time, so we didn’t have to run half a block, but if we had, I would have not been winded. I didn’t think about the stairs, I just went up them. I ate lots all day and enjoyed it.

I plotted how I’m going to become a better kickboxer. See, I have athletic goals, like how to be a more effective ass-kicker, and how to increase my plyo abilities, and how to make myself do more intervals. Sometimes I actually do things towards these goals, imagine that. When I watch the Olympics, I steal training moves from the athletes, not because I plan to compete (stunner, I know) but because I do athletic shit and make other people do it too.

I adore this slide show of Olympic athletes and their stats, sent to me by Kim, a rising star on Team Badass. Here you have photographic evidence that there isn’t one kind of elite athletic body. You also get to see that these people, who do exceptionally amazing things, are built and trained to be very specifically good at their sport. If you can do a marathon in record time or lift a gigantic barbell, I applaud you. The rest of us are probably going to have to content ourselves with being as well-rounded as we can be, working on our strengths and weaknesses so we can do what we want to do in our lives, daily and for one-off events. But we can appreciate that we all don’t have one body type either, nor should we, even though we aren’t going to Bejing.

Sporty shit does some things to my body composition, and it might do similar or different things to yours. That’s cool, y’know. What can each of us do if we train? What are we good at? What do we just love to do? What do we suffer through but feel better for having accomplished?

I fucking love the Olympics in many ways. It’s phenomenal to see people be superheroes. It’s inspiring. Most of us will never be Olympians. That’s what makes them so great, those games. Oh, and in more obvious sentiments, puppies are often cute. Happiness is good. Love bites. Biking chamois shorts are a mixed bag—wicking yes, but do you wanna sit on a mop of your own sweat? Christopher Walken is a god. Okay, I’ll stop.

In the roto-tiller lifting, bus-chasing Olympics, I’m doing okay. I’m not even the fastest runner most days on the track I run at near my house. Even though I am competitive as fuck, I could care less about that. I love the shit I do. My skinny pants sometimes make me feel bad about myself, but for whatever reason, today the list of things I can do trumped that shit. Maybe because I realized that when people tell me they want to lose weight, I think more often they just want to feel good about their bodies, which might seem like the same thing, and it might even be the same thing, but I know there’s in fact tons of things to feel good about. Anxiety-relieving runs, for example. Being able to run at all, or know that in the future you’ll be able to run, just maybe. Knowing that I’ll work out tomorrow, and the next day, and both dread and love it, but either way, I’ll do it. And while I can tweak on pants in my fuck-me brain, I also realized that I wore shorts for most of the day, and you know, I didn’t wear shorts in public until I was in my late twenties. Now I hardly notice when I do it. And that’s just a small thought next to the shit I do that I never, ever thought I’d be able to do. Like push ups. Plural.

Lemme tell you, life is suh-weet.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 11th, 2008 at 10:31 pm and is filed under blah blah, body building, fads and facts, healthy crap, injuries, love, running, shari, weight. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.