FitnessFixation.com

You know, having a blog is a funny thing. Some days I feel very strongly about things, as I am wont to do, and I go off. Other days I just try and be funny. Sometimes I’m just trying to whip out something while the ladies in my house mess on their iPhones and watch “30 Rock” and I’m totally distracted by Jack saying, “Sometimes I cover my pain with sex and awesomeness.” Fuck yeah. And on some days, I barf out a bunch of stuff, and then afterwards I ask myself, “Do I really think that?” Hell, I dunno…

Yesterday was one of the latter kind of days. Truthfully, I don’t know if being all self-loathing-y really helps motivate me or not. I do believe in action above thoughts, because I think actions say the most about who we are. That’s a scary prospect, because sometimes my actions aren’t always in alignment with how I would like to think of myself. But it’s still the best measure I have, I guess. Oh boy, I don’t know.

Break from the pointless musings with other pointless things: Hey, did I mention someone sent me this site, “10 Things” that look like a hoo hoo? They call it a woo woo. We pretend we didn’t hear that. But you know, if you thought the mussel was bad, then maybe I’m vindicated now.

Anyhow, I’ve been listening to lots of people lately say how they want to do this or that new fitness activity, but they are scared. I totally know how that feels. Whenever I begin a new endeavor, I have to go through this period of totally resisting doing it, because unfamiliarity freaks me the fuck out. Plus I have these amorphous fears—maybe that I’ll suck, or it will be hard, or that I’ll actually have to drive or something to get there—and I do the battle royale to motivate myself into showing up.

Sometimes I don’t, I fuck something off. When I go anyway, eventually that feeling of fear leaves and I forget about it. But it can take a while, maybe days, weeks, months. Panic-inertia is the enemy of new fitness enterprises.

I have also found that if I drop out for a while, the resistance to going returns. When I was working at a gym, I went through a phase of being kind of anxious about taking classes myself. I told myself it was because of some special trainer pressure to perform, but I doubt that’s true, since many folks I know have said they left for a while and were scared to come back. It’s hard to make yourself do stuff sometimes. Fuck, maybe it’s fear of failure. Does it actually matter? Shit.

I do know that in many instances, once I went back with some consistency, things improved. Not just my ability, but also my willingness. I had to get into a habit, so I forgot all the stupid reasons I’d be better off doing something else, like dicking around or glancing over at the television. In one or two cases, I ended up hating the whole thing for various reasons, and I dropped out for good. But my initial feelings aren’t really a good measure of that. I actually have to give something a sporting try first.

I really hate fear, it’s my least favorite of all the feelings, and I’m generally not a fan of feelings anyway on most days. I’m even a’feard of fear—well, I’m scared of being a coward. And I’m almost uniformly afraid of the future, so I think about it often. I’m afraid of making mistakes too. Actually the list here could be quite long. The only thing I know to do about any of it is to try and gingerly take little tiny steps towards something that looks potentially promising for now, and take deep breaths. Because you just never know until… well, what the fuck.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 4th, 2008 at 11:52 pm and is filed under blah blah, exercise, feelings, healthy crap, sanity, stress. 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.